What Can I Cook with What I Have? Search Your Own Recipes by Ingredient

It’s 6:40pm. There’s half a bag of spinach, two eggs, some feta, a lemon and a jar of chickpeas. The question everyone types at this point is “what can I cook with what I have?” The usual answer is an ingredient search engine that shows you 400 recipes from strangers, most of which need a fresh herb you don’t have.

There’s a better place to look: the recipes you’ve already saved. You saved them because they looked good, they suit how you cook, and many of them came from creators you trust. The problem is that your saves are buried in TikTok Favorites, Instagram Collections and your camera roll, where nothing can search them by ingredient. This guide shows how to fix that.

Why “recipes by ingredient” sites don’t quite work

Ingredient-search websites and apps are useful, but they share three weaknesses:

They search someone else’s database. The results are whatever recipes that site has indexed, not the ones you’ve already decided you’d like to cook.
“Uses your ingredients” often means “uses one of them.” A recipe that uses your eggs but also needs heavy cream, shallots and tarragon isn’t really dinner tonight.
Staples confuse the count. Most recipes need salt, pepper and oil. A search that counts those as missing pushes good matches down the list. One that doesn’t count them at all can hide the one thing you’re out of.

What you want is a ranking of your recipes: the ones you can make right now first, then the ones that are one or two items away.

Step 1: Get your saved recipes somewhere searchable

Ingredient search needs ingredient lists. A TikTok where the quantities are only spoken in the voiceover doesn’t have one until something turns it into text.

That’s what Pluck does. Share a TikTok, Instagram Reel, YouTube video, Facebook post or recipe website to Pluck, or snap a photo of a cookbook page or handwritten card. The AI pulls out a structured recipe with an ingredient list. See how Pluck extracts recipes from video for what happens under the hood.

If you’re moving from another recipe app, you can import your whole collection from Paprika, Mela, Crouton, CopyMeThat or a JSON-LD recipe file instead of starting from zero. Our guide to switching recipe apps walks through it.

Step 2: Ask “What can I cook?”

In the recipe box, tap What can I cook? and add what you have. Pluck suggests ingredients from your own saved recipes as you type, and before you type anything it offers the ones your recipes use most.

Pluck then ranks your recipe box by how much of each recipe you can cover:

Can make now. Recipes where you have everything. These come first.
Missing 1 or 2. Each result shows what’s missing by name, like “Missing 2: cumin, red onion”, so you can decide in a second whether it’s a substitution or a trip to the shop.
Uses N of your ingredients. When nothing is a perfect match, Pluck shows the closest recipes instead of an empty screen.

Ignore staples is on by default, so salt, pepper, oil and water don’t count as missing. Turn it off when you’re not sure you still have them. Your ingredients are remembered between visits, so you don’t have to retype the pantry basics every time.

“What can I cook?” is free and unlimited on every Pluck plan, including the free one.

Step 3: Cook it, then keep the recipe useful

Once you’ve picked something, tap Start cooking. Cook mode walks you through one step at a time in large text and keeps the screen awake. If a recipe is “missing 1” and you want to swap, paid plans include the AI cooking assistant. Ask “can I use spinach instead of kale here?” and it answers for that exact recipe. You can apply the change to your saved copy.

A few habits make ingredient search better every week:

Check the ingredient list when you save. Search can only find what’s on the list, so if a creator mentioned the garlic only in passing, make sure it made it in.
Save the boring recipes too. The weeknight standbys, like fried rice, frittata and pasta e ceci, are exactly what ingredient search should surface on a Thursday.
Group the use-it-up recipes. A recipe group called “Fridge clear-out” gives you a shortlist to try first.

Why this cuts food waste

Most food waste at home is perfectly good ingredients that nobody had a plan for: the half bunch of coriander, the last two courgettes. Searching a database of strangers’ recipes treats that as a discovery problem. Searching your own box treats it as a decision problem, and decisions are faster. You already know you like these recipes, and you already know roughly how long they take.

Pair it with the meal plan: plan three or four dinners, and on the unplanned nights let “What can I cook?” use up what’s left.

A real example

Say your fridge has spinach, eggs, feta, a lemon and chickpeas. With “Ignore staples” on, a recipe box of about 80 saved recipes might return:

Recipe	Result
Spinach and feta frittata	Can make now
Crispy chickpeas with lemon yogurt	Missing 1: Greek yogurt
Spanakopita-style skillet pie	Missing 1: filo pastry
Shakshuka	Missing 2: tomatoes, onion

The frittata is dinner. The chickpea recipe goes on the grocery list for later in the week.

What about scanning the fridge?

Typing five ingredients takes about fifteen seconds. Pointing a camera at the fridge is faster still. In “What can I cook?”, tap Scan ingredients and take a photo of the fridge or the pantry: Pluck spots what’s there and fills in the search for you. Anything it got wrong, you remove with a tap.

If nothing you’ve saved fits, Pluck can create a new recipe from what you have. It’s labelled as AI-created, so you always know which recipes came from a creator and which from the app. Creating one uses one of your monthly extractions.

The photo scan is limited per month (1 on the free plan, 5 on Light, 50 on Plus, 100 on Pro). Typed search stays free and unlimited. The full walkthrough is in recipes from a photo of your fridge.

The short answer

“What can I cook with what I have?” is best answered by recipes you already wanted to make. Get them out of social feeds and into a searchable recipe box, then search by ingredient. Most nights you’ll find something without searching the internet at all.

Pluck is available on iOS and Android. Get it on Google Play or on the App Store. New to Pluck? Start with how Pluck works.