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Cooking: the Cook page and the Cook wizard

The Cook page ("What can I cook?") is where Pantry Raider turns what is in your fridge into something to make tonight. It ranks your own recipes by how much of each one you already have in stock and floats items expiring soon to the top, so "this is about to go off" becomes "here is what to make with it". Alongside your library it pulls ideas from the free web recipe source (TheMealDB, or Spoonacular if you add a key) in a separate "From the Web" section.

Tapping a recipe, yours or a web one, opens a quick view inside the app with its photo, ingredients, and steps. Every ingredient you already have is tagged: an "In stock" chip for things in your inventory and an "On hand" chip for things on your staples list, leaving a short shopping list of the rest. From the quick view you can Cook it (make it the current recipe on the On the Line page), Add to cart (put what you are missing on your shopping list, minus your staples), Print it, or open the original source.

The match respects amounts, not just names. When a recipe names an amount and Grocy knows the product's own unit conversions (a bottle of olive oil that holds 500 g, say), the Cook page uses them: a recipe asking for 200 g counts that bottle as covering it, and a recipe wanting more than you actually have moves honestly to the worth-shopping-for tier, with the ingredient on the list Add to cart builds. Only the conversions you have defined in Grocy are used, per product or global, never a guess; ingredients without amounts, and products without conversions, match by name as before.

The Cook wizard

Not sure what you want yet? The Cook page has a Launch cook wizard button that opens a step-by-step, touch-friendly guide, sized for a kitchen screen.

  • Know what you want? Type it in and the wizard searches your own recipes and the web, or you can ask the AI to write one for you.
  • Not sure? Tap through a few big-button questions (cuisine, dish type, dietary needs) and land on suggestions drawn from your own library and the web, with the option to have the AI invent something. Every step is skippable, so you can answer as few or as many as you like.

Every result opens the usual quick view, so Cook, Add to cart, and Print all work from inside the wizard. The AI create option appears only when you have an AI provider set up. Answering a cuisine, dish type, or dietary question narrows your own recipe library the same way it narrows web results, and matches are ranked by fit rather than your saved recipes always showing first.

Suggested buttons that follow how you cook

The Start Page and Stream Deck editors offer a Suggested section that watches your real history. Groceries you have bought three or more times in the last month turn up as ready-made quick-add shopping buttons, and a recipe you cook often turns up as a Cook shortcut. Each suggestion says why it is offered, adds with one tap, and can be dismissed for good. Because the suggestions follow what you actually do, they keep up as your habits change.

Where recipes live

Recipes, the meal plan, and the shopping list are all built into Pantry Raider, so the Cook page works with nothing but Pantry Raider and Grocy. If you already run Mealie you can connect it and keep using it, or copy your library over with one click. See Recipes: built in, Mealie optional for the full picture.

Sharing recipes

Every recipe on the Recipes page has a Share button. What it can do depends on whether the kitchen is signed in to Forager:

  • Share a link. With Forager connected, one tap creates a public link to a clean, printable copy of the recipe hosted at forager.pantryraider.app. The same panel offers the link by email, on the usual social networks (X, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Telegram), through your device's own share sheet, or as a plain copy button. Anyone can open the link; nobody needs an account to read or print it. You can revoke a link at any time from your Forager account, and links that get reported are taken down automatically.
  • Send it to a person. Enter their email address. If they use Forager, the recipe lands in their "Shared with you" list and shows up on their own Recipes page ready to import with one tap; either way they get an email with the link, so it works for people who have never heard of Pantry Raider too.
  • Post it to the community. The community library share: the recipe (with your credit line) becomes browsable by every Forager kitchen. The moment the post succeeds, its public link appears right in the share window, with an Open button and the same one-tap share buttons as a private link, so you can see and send the page straight away.
  • Send a copy, no Forager needed. The share panel's Send a copy section offers two downloads and says what each is for: Download as text saves the recipe the way a person reads it (title, times and servings, ingredients one per line under their section headings, then numbered steps), and Download for import saves a standard recipe file another Pantry Raider reads back in with the From File button (it uses the common schema.org format, so other apps understand it too). You can also email the recipe text directly from the share panel; the message is the same readable text, trimmed cleanly to a length every mail app accepts, with a note when a very long recipe continues past what fits.

Recipes shared with you appear in a "Shared with you" section on the Recipes page; importing one adds it to your own library.

Copycat recipes are welcome in the community. If your recipe is your own take on a branded product or a restaurant dish, say so in the name: "Copycat Oreo Truffles", "Olive Garden-style Alfredo", and "Inspired by Cinnabon" are all great titles. What to avoid is a brand name standing alone as your recipe's own name; if that happens, the share still goes through, and the app simply suggests the copycat form. Naming a store-bought ingredient ("1 cup Nutella") is always fine, anywhere in a recipe.

A recipe itself (the ingredients and the basic steps) is yours to share. Text copied from a cookbook or a recipe site is not, so share recipes in your own words and use the credit line to say where a recipe came from. A share that carries an obvious publisher line such as "reprinted with permission" is refused, with the reason spelled out.

If you hold the copyright to text that appears in a community recipe, send a takedown notice to [email protected] with a link to the recipe, the work you believe it copies, and how to reach you. The recipe is unpublished while the notice stands and a record of the notice is kept. If your recipe was taken down and you wrote it yourself, reply to the same address with a counter notice saying so; a valid one puts the recipe back up.