Kadai & Cooker started from a small, annoying problem: you know you have paneer, two peppers and half an onion, and no website on earth will simply tell you what that adds up to.
So we built the ingredient picker first and the recipe pages second. Tick what's on your shelf and the collection reorders itself around you — what you can cook right now, what you're one ingredient short of, and what to pick up on the way home. The search box understands dishes, cuisines, tags and ingredients at once, and forgives a typo, because nobody spells kasuri methi right the first time.
Everything else follows from that decision. Recipes are written for a kadai and a pressure cooker, because that's what's actually on the hob in most kitchens. Quantities rescale properly, down to one serving and up to twelve, with fractions that exist on a real spoon. And there is no life story between you and the ingredient list.
Where we are today
A deliberately small collection. We would rather publish twenty-seven recipes that work than two thousand scraped ones that mostly don't.
How a recipe gets published
Every recipe on the site goes through the same five steps. If a recipe can't survive step four, it doesn't go up.
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Cooked the way it's normally cooked
We start from how the dish is actually made in home kitchens, not from an optimised version invented for a photograph.
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Weighed, not eyeballed
Every quantity is measured on a scale or in spoons and written down. That's what makes the servings dial trustworthy — the numbers scale from something real.
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Cooked again by someone else
A second person cooks it from the written draft alone, with no explanation. Anywhere they hesitate is a badly written step, and it gets rewritten.
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Timed on a normal hob
The times on the page are the times it took, on a domestic gas burner, in a household pan. Not on induction in a test kitchen.
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Indexed properly
Each ingredient is mapped to our index so the pantry matcher can find it. An unindexed ingredient is invisible to search, which makes the recipe useless here.
What we won't do
No paid recipes
Nobody can buy their way into the collection or into a search result. If that ever changes, it will be labelled on the recipe itself, at the top.
No essay before the ingredients
The ingredient list is the first thing on a recipe page. You came here to cook, not to read about our holiday.
No invented nutrition
We don't print calorie counts we haven't had calculated. An estimate dressed up as a number is worse than no number.
No selling your pantry
What you tick on your shelf is used to sort recipes for you and nothing else. It is not sold, and it is not handed to advertisers.
Found a mistake?
A quantity that doesn't work, a step in the wrong order, a time that's optimistic. Tell us and we'll test it again.