Quick Dish Cook Book

Supercook – The Best App For Using Up The Ingredients In Your Pantry 

supercook app

Supercook – The Best App For Using Up The Ingredients In Your Pantry 

How many times do you find yourself opening you cupboards and proclaiming “There’s nothing to eat!”. The truth is, the cupboards aren’t normally empty, it’s just that if you’re like me, you don’t have any idea what to do with half the stuff in there. Well, there’s now an app which helps you use up what’s in your pantry and suggested delicious recipes that you can make at once without needing to go grocery shopping. It’s called Supercook. Here’s my review of the Supercook app after having used it for two weeks. 

How To Log Your Ingredients With Supercook 

When you first start using Supercook, the only ingredients the app assumes you have are salt, pepper, and water – everything else you need to tell it. You can tick items off from the lists provided in the different app sections (Fruit, Vegetables, Dairy, Grains etc.), find and add items individually by name using the search bar, or press the microphone icon and just say out loud what you see as you look through your cupboards, fridge, and freezer. You don’t log how much of something you have, just whether or not you have it. 

My advice is that if you do this, you do it PROPERLY. I spent about 45 minutes going through every item in my kitchen, and I mean EVERY item. Every half-finished bag of red lentils, every obscure type of flour I’d bought during my lockdown baking phase, every jar of spice, every variety of dried chili, every bag of frozen veg. I was amazed at how specific you can be in the app when you are logging ingredients. Rather than just “mushrooms” you can separately log portobello, button, oyster etc. In fact, by the time I had finished I had logged 228 ingredients I had in the house and there were only two items which the app didn’t recognise (Laoganma Crispy Chilli Sauce and Danish Malt Syrup). 

What To Do Once You’ve Logged Your Ingredients 

Once you have logged everything in your pantry, (I’ll stress again that this works best if you do so thoroughly and accurately), you can click on “See Recipes” and the app will crawl the web for recipes which match your available ingredients. It even tells you how many recipes you could make. So, for example, with the 228 ingredients I logged, there were 39,446 recipes I could theoretically make. 

These recipe suggestions are the real USP of the app. There are other apps which let you search for recipes by ingredient, and in theory all you need is a pen and paper to log what ingredients you have in the house. However, combining these two features lets you see every recipe that you could make without you having to search for them. You can also go into the “My Pantry” section to pick a specific ingredient. This will narrow the recipe suggestions down to only ones which use your chosen ingredients. 

If tens of thousands of recipe suggestions weren’t already enough, there’s also an option for “missing one ingredient”. This shows you recipes where you have all but one of the ingredients, which is a great section to check before you go to the shops. There is even a shopping list built into the app, so you can tap any ingredients you are missing to add them to your shopping list. 

Cooking What The App Suggests 

I decided to see if I could not spend anything on food for a few days and only live off what I had in the house. Not only would this save me money, but it would also use up some store cupboard staples. I also wanted to try recipes that I wouldn’t have normally gravitated towards. 

  • For breakfast, I had some “Carrot cake overnight oats”. Basically oats, milk, cinnamon, walnut pieces, and a little bit of maple sugar. This was tasty and not something I would ever normally have for breakfast. 
  • For lunch I made some American style sausage, biscuits, and white gravy. 
  • For dinner I had a spicy tomato, lentil, and onion soup. 

By the end of the first day, I had made three delicious meals and hadn’t spent a penny on any new ingredients. By the end of the first week, I’d eaten delicious meals every day and the only things I’d spent any money on were eggs and milk – every other ingredient was something I already had in the house! I’d also used up some dry ingredients like lentils and rolled oats that had been sitting around in my cupboards for months. 

How Supercook Has Changed The Way I Shop & Made Me Eat More Vegetables 

I’ve always struggled to eat enough vegetables. I love vegetables, I was raised by two vegetarian parents and I’m not a strict carnivore by anyone’s measure. That said, I often find that I don’t pick up much fresh veg when I go shopping. Supercook has really changed this. 

Now, when I go shopping, I pick up multiple different vegetables, almost at random – and trust that Supercook will tell me what to do with it. The other day I bought leeks, aubergine, and fennel. Supercook combined these with the ingredients I already had and suggested pasta with a leek and cream sauce, a tomato and fennel bake, and a smoked aubergine dip. Three dishes that I wouldn’t have thought of. 

So, in this sense, Supercook can help you be more confident in trying new ingredients and having a more varied diet. 

Try It Today 

I honestly cannot recommend this app enough. In the past two weeks I’ve spent less than a fifth of what my normal expenditure on food would be, eaten three delicious meals every day, not eaten a single takeaway, cleared through some store cupboard staples that had been taking up space, and cooked a bunch of new recipes I never would have thought to try by myself. Apparently, there are still 24,000 possible recipes I could make with the ingredients I have left. 

The best part is the app is free! I was previously paying £5 a month for a different app called Stashcook, but this has every feature that app has, and it has the recipe recommendations (the best feature!). 

You can download the app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. 

Basically, it’s much harder to say “there’s nothing in the house” and order yourself a takeaway when you know there are literally 39,446 things you could cook. Or at least, it’s harder not to feel guilty about doing it! 

© Copyright Quick Dish Cookbook 2024 | Privacy Policy