How it works

Well Diced takes the ingredients you have and matches them against real recipes. Here's the short version.

1. 1. Tell us what's in your kitchen. Type the ingredients you have into the box on the home page. Plain text works — “chicken, rice, half an onion” is fine. Toggle the basics checklist for staples you do (or don't) have.
2. 2. We find recipes that fit. Behind the scenes we send your ingredients to a recipe database and apply a few filters to keep the results relevant. Recipes come back in tiers based on how well they match.
3. 3. Pick one and go. Click any recipe to see the full ingredient list, what you have versus what you're missing, substitution suggestions for the gaps, and a link to the full recipe on its original site.

What the tiers mean

• Ready tonight — recipes that match everything you have. The home run.
• Almost there — recipes missing one to three ingredients. We'll suggest substitutions when we can.
• Further away — recipes missing four or more ingredients. Worth knowing about, but harder to pull off without a grocery run.
• Worth a closer look — recipes where our data might not show the full ingredient list. We flag these so you can verify before committing.

About the basics

If you have salt, pepper, oil, butter, eggs, and the usual kitchen staples, leave them checked in the basics box. We'll factor them in. If you're out of one, uncheck it and the recipes will reflect that.

What does “Verify ingredients” mean?

Sometimes the recipe data we receive doesn't include every ingredient — especially for recipes from sites with complex ingredient lists. When we suspect a recipe has more to it than we can see, we flag it under “Worth a closer look” so you can double-check the source before starting.