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SuperCook Wants to Help You Stop Throwing Away Food
NY-based SuperCook has just launched their new recipe matching Web application. The idea with SuperCook is to help you take the items in your fridge and pantry and put them to use before they get moldy.
When I heard about SuperCook, the first thing that came to mind was that it’s a RecipeMatcher clone. Both services are solving the same problem but go about it differently. RecipeMatcher houses the recipes on their site and also allows users to submit recipes. SuperCook links out to other recipe sites after the desired recipe is selected.
SuperCook is very slick in function. There is a slick ingredient finder which auto-finishes as you type for easy selecting. As you enter more ingredients, the right panels update automatically to match the available recipes. The system also checks to see if you have complementary items to help find additional recipe choices. Once you find a recipe you like, it takes you to the site that houses the recipe with a frame back to SuperCook. All of the searches I tried took me to RecipeZaar.
The only real concern I have is whether this is a service that could generate revenue as they send their visitors away so quickly. There is an advertisement on the site but I am not sure it’s enough. I do see a quick acquisition by RecipeZaar though - the functionality would be a huge improvement for the Web 1.0 recipe site.
Sadly, there were no recipe matches for day-old pizza and leftover Ramen noodles.
Anonymous says: My mistake, I realized I had to enter the ingredients ONE AT A TIME. Once I did that, I got tons and tons of recipes back. Awesome!!
centernetworks says: cool :)
Anonymous says: Your feeding off of other peoples success is pathetic. You should be ashamed.
Lazar says: ‘…enter the ingredients ONE AT A TIME…’
Of course, that is the only possible way to enter them.
SuperCook does give 2000 ingredients, but all of them require me to put additional ingredient that I don’t have at home, like ‘beef steak’, and only after I add 29th ingredient ‘beef steak’ does it tell ‘You can make 23 recipes right now’.
Without last ingredient, it does not give any recipe that uses only ingredients from my kitchen.
Lazar says: ‘SuperCook does give 2000 ingredients’
should be
‘SuperCook does give 2000 recipes’
Anonymous says: You are a liar and a deadbeat spammer. I entered the first 10 of your ingredients into supercook.com and already got 117 recipes I can make with those ingredients. And that was with just 10 of your 28 ingredients. If I put all 28 of yours, it would return hundreds and hundreds of recipes. Everyone reading this can go ahead and try it for themselves, and they will all realize that a deadbeat spammer you are, Lazar of Ezeating.net
Erica says: It works fine if you click on the ‘All Results’ tab. You probably were on the ‘Entrees’ tab, and none of your ingredients are main ingredients, suitable for an Entree.
Lazar says: First, Supercook assumes your kitchen at home has salt, pepper, sugar and water, so I will not manually enter those. Then, I enter these, one by one, one at a time:
flour
onion
butter
garlic
nutella
bread
apple
orange
banana
zucchini
zuchinni
rice
tomato
potato
vegetable oil
paprika
soy milk
olive
seasoning
oregano
peas
And I get 2000 recipes of which NOT ONE I can cook (yes, in ALL RESULTS tab), as it asks me if I also have ‘beef steak’, which I don’t as I avoid eating meat. It DOES NOT say ‘You can make XYZ recipes right now!
As of today, February 11, 2008, when SuperCook claims to have ‘Well over 250,000 recipes’, it has zero for my ingredients.
As of the same day (today), when ezEating claims to have ‘75,000+ cooking and cocktail recipes indexed’, I get the whole page of results that I can narrow down.
And don’t call me a liar or spammer. If you cannot handle the truth, than go f… ………
Anonymous says: Here is a link to a screenshot of what Supercook returns for your list of ingredients: http://i26.tinypic.com/qn72it.jpg
As everyone can see, it returns hundreds of recipes you can make.
So yes Lazar, you are a liar, and yes Lazar, you are a spammer. Look up the definition of spam and you will understand why I call you a spammer. You are simply embarrassing yourself Lazar. Getting a few people to go to your site by spamming is pathetic, but I guess that is the type of person you are Lazar Kovacevic.
Lazar says: SuperCook works in really weird way.
Search engines are supposed to give you as many results for a query, and when you narrow a search by saying ‘recipe must have this’ they should give less. However, SuperCook works diferently.
When I toggled ‘bread’, and by doing that told it that a recipe has to have ‘bread’, then it showed 161 recipes. But when there is not ingredient selected on the left, it shows no ready recipes.
So that is a bug they need to fix.
Anonymous says: Here are my screenshots:
not working when not selected on the left
working when bread selected on the left
Lazar says: Because site should work the same for all users, I looked into cookes trying to find out why I was getting different results from you.
I found out that ‘list_hi’ cookie did not erase my previous selections from yesterday, that was not on todays list. So when I erased that cookie manually from Firefox Privacy options menu, I did get 242 recipes for above list.
This explains why we both were right in our opinions given the information we had.
Each of us really got results we wrote here. Mine were changed due to their not properly functioning cookie.
Lazar says: those 2 screenshot links are mine…
Just a quick note that at BigOven.com, we have a “Leftover Wizard” that shows you what you can make with up to 3 ingredients in your fridge. Some of the ideas cited in the review above are interesting, and we’re working on further on-the-fly suggestions/refinements to the search.
See the leftover wizard here.
I entered ‘water salt pepper sugar flour onion oil butter garlic nutella bread apple orange banana zucchini zuchinni rice tomato potato vegetable paprika soy milk olive seasoning oregano peas butter’, and got zero recipes that I could cook!
Note that salt, pepper, sugar and water are included by default.
I then tried the same ingredients in ezEating.net