Recipe Companion

We designed a tool to help cooks find potential substitutes for novel foods in recipes you don’t currently own and don’t plan to buy. This way, you can focus on what matters - your cooking!

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Inspiration

As cooking enthusiasts, our team bonded over the difficulty of using certain recipes with unique ingredients that we don’t currently own and feels like a waste to buy if we would only use it once. Often, we’re pretty sure it can probably be substituted for something else we already own, but we don’t know the exact amount or ratios. To make this process easier to navigate for home cooks alike, we wanted to make a tool that could suggest substitutes for any tricky ingredients in a recipe. We also wanted to make sure the UI was engaging and simple to use, so that anyone from beginner cooks to experienced cooks can benefit from our platform.

What it does

All you need to do is paste the URL of your recipe into the search bar, and select the ingredients you need to substitute, and we’ll tell you the exact ratios and ingredients you’ll need for your recipe. Bon Appetite!

How I built it

We built this website's front-end using React using javascript and css. We built the website's back-end using Express.js, and we hosted the website on Google Cloud Platform.

Challenges I ran into

This was my first time developing a full website and using React, and I found it challenging to tackle something new using a new language. However, it was really fun to learn something new and see our ideas come alive.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud that everyone in the team worked together tightly and communicated very well.

What I learned

I learned a lot of web development, and I learned more about communication while working online together with my teammates.

What's next for Recipe Companion

Our project is currently only an MVP, operating on two recipe websites (allrecipes.com and tasty.com) and spanning a limited number of food substitutes. In the near future, we want to generalize the recipe reader to all cooking websites for a more smooth and customizable user experience. Also, we wish to expand our library of food substitutes to include all possible ingredients that home cooks might not own.

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