Help - FoodFerret

FoodFerret

FoodFerret allows you to search over a million recipes from other websites to quickly find the recipe you're looking for, including drink recipes such as cocktails.

Recipes can be searched against lists of ingredients contained in or excluded from the recipe. Keywords contained in the title and various recipe types can also be searched for. As an example, you can easily search for a smoothie recipe containing strawberries, but not containing raspberries.

Please note that the recipes we return can not be guaranteed to match your search parameters. In fact we can guarantee that there will be occasional errors in our database, although we strive to keep these to a minimum. If you have particular dietary concerns, especially with regards to food allergies or intolerances, you must personally check that the recipe matches your requirements.

Go to the search page to look for the recipe you want, or you can browse recipes by category.

Recipe Search Engine

We provide 2 recipe search methods.

Normal Mode will provide the best match against any recipe title keywords entered and recipes returned must match any 'must include' or 'must exclude' ingredients. Recipes returned will be ordered based on matching the recipe title keywords, if you have entered any keywords.

Ingredients at Hand Mode will provide the best match against the ingredients you have at hand or ingredients you want to use up. Since the recipes returned are ordered by their match against your ingredients at hand, the title keyword search operates differently in this mode. Any title keywords entered must all be contained in the recipe title, where as in normal search mode we just provide the best match we can. If the recipes being returned do not include an ingredient you particularly wish to use, simply set that ingredient as a 'must include' ingredient.

See the examples below which demonstrate how useful this search mode can be.

Example Searches

Cocktails: If you're having a cocktail party or just want to see what you can make with what you've got, just enter all the ingredients you have into the 'I have at hand' ingredient list, using the Ingredients at Hand search mode. A list of cocktails you can make will be returned. If you want particular ingredients to be used in the cocktail, just set them as must include ingredients. Select the Use only 'at hand' items radio button, located below the ingredient entry boxes. This will tell the search engine to return recipes using only the ingredients you have listed, rather than emphasize finding recipes that use all your ingredients in a single recipe.

Coconut Flavored Rice: If you want to incorporate certain flavors into your recipe, but are not too concerned what ingredients are used to generate that flavor, the Ingredients at Hand search mode can be useful. To find coconut flavored rice recipes, try this search. Rice is selected as a must include ingredient and coconut, coconut milk, coconut cream and creamed coconut are entered as at hand ingredients. The Use most 'at hand' items radio button is selected to emphasize using the coconut ingredients in the recipe as opposed to Use only 'at hand' items which would avoid using ingredients that you haven't listed.

More recipe search ideas...
Using FoodFerret for Food Intolerances
Using FoodFerret for no-cook and raw food
Milk free ice cream recipes
Chicken flavored with apricots

Recipe Title Search

If you enter some text into the 'Title Keywords' section of the search page, all recipes whose titles contain those keywords will be returned. You can enter a - character before a word to exclude that word from your results. So searching for 'chicken tikka -masala' will return recipes with chicken tikka in the title, but not if they also have masala in the title.

If you're having trouble finding the recipe you want, try to avoid entering ingredient names into this section. For example, you might be looking for a chicken tikka recipe. It is more effective to enter 'tikka' into the Title Keywords section, but enter 'chicken' in the Must Include ingredient section. When this approach is taken the search engine would also return recipes with a title of 'Murgh Tikka' which is the same as chicken tikka.

Ingredient List Search

This area is split into 2 sections, the Must Include list and the Must Exclude list. Each section can contain several ingredients. Every ingredient contained in your Must Include section must be found in the recipe ingredient list for that recipe to be returned in your search results. Every ingredient contained in your Must Exclude section must not be found in the recipe ingredient list.

Entering Ingredients
When entering ingredients it is best to enter one ingredient at a time, type in the text for the ingredient and hit the enter key or click on the search button. The text you entered will then be analyzed and the ingredient added to the correct list. If we do not recognize the ingredient, we will let you know.

Partial Matching Ingredients
You may enter as little as 3 letters for a partial match to be performed on our ingredient list. Enter 'bl c' into one of the ingredient text boxes and a list of possible ingredient matches will be returned, such as Blue Curacao and Blackcurrant Coulis. We will provide checkboxes against each returned ingredient allowing you to place it in your Must Include or Must Exclude list if required.

Ingredient Keywords
An alternative way to find an ingredient is to enter something along the lines of 'vodka*', the * character indicates that we will perform a match against that word for all our ingredients. In this case every ingredient with vodka as part of it's name will be returned. All flavored vodkas will be returned and ingredients such as Dooley's Toffee and Vodka.

Brand Names
When possible try to avoid brand names. We group most branded products into their generic group. For example, Smirnoff is simply recognized as vodka. We do recognize some brand names, but you're more likely to be successful using the generic name for the ingredient.

Dietary Restrictions

All recipes viewed from either the browse or search pages can be filtered to match dietary requirements. At present only vegetarian, vegan or an unrestricted diet can be selected. We do provide some allergen groups though that you can use in the 'must exclude' ingredient boxes. Any of our ingredient groups that starts with 'containing' means all ingredients that contain that particular allergen. For example, insert 'containing milk' into the must exclude ingredient list and all ingredients that contain milk, such as yogurt, butter and even chocolate are then excluded from your recipes.

Vegetarian: Excludes poultry and meat such as beef, lamb, pork etc. Seafood, dairy and eggs are not excluded. Other ingredients that you would expect to contain animal products are not excluded, such as chicken stock cubes.

Vegan: Excludes all meat and dairy. Many items are still allowed, such as fish sauce, since you may have suitable alternatives available and we are not experts on the contents of products. Items such as ice cream are allowed, since vegan ice cream is available and we are not in a position to say whether the recipe is suitable for vegan ice cream or not. Cheese is only allowed if we recognize that the recipe refers to vegan cheese.

my Cupboard: Searches all recipes against your personal store cupboard. See below.

Store Cupboard / Personal Diet Profile

Create a personal store cupboard to easily find the recipes you want against as complicated an allowable ingredient list as you want. For food allergies or intolerances, exclude recipes that use your bad ingredients by clicking on that ingredient to mark it with a red cross. All allowable ingredients will be marked with a green tick. The store cupboard can also be used to exclude recipes that use ingredients that you just can't get hold off, or don't want to use.

The cupboard is displayed as an expandable list, click on the yellow + boxes to expand that section of the list. Any list heading can be clicked to change the cupboard setting for all ingredients under that heading. The list is very extensive, so can be hard to navigate and we could include certain items under several headings. For help in finding an ingredient simply type the name in the 'Find Ingredient' box.

Find Ingredient Mode: The mode of the find ingredient box can be changed to 'exclude ingredient' or 'include ingredient'. In these modes the ingredient to be found will automatically be marked to include or exclude, depending on the mode selected.

The store cupboard will appear in a light blue box until you make changes that require saving. When the cupboard has been altered the background will change to a light reddish color. To perform a search with the new settings you must save your cupboard, your search results will be updated automatically if your dietary preferences are set to use 'my Cupboard'.

Your store cupboard can easily be ignored or used for searches by altering the dietary preference settings. Select the 'my Cupboard' setting to use your store cupboard or any other setting to ignore it, 'None' will obviously apply no dietary limits to your search.

my Cupboard (local version)

If you would prefer not to set up a free account with us to store your cupboard you can simply save it to a local file on your computer called a cookie. In this instance the link for opening the cupboard and the top of the cupboard itself should be clearly marked as a local version. We recommend opening a free account instead, these cookies are easily deleted by mistake which could result in loss of substantial work if your cupboard preferences are extensive. We do not ask for any personal information when you open an account, but we do recommend that you use your email address as your username. This will allow us to email you your password should you forget it, otherwise you may not be able to regain access to your account should you forget your password.

To use the store cupboard you must enable javascript.

Search Within Recipe Category

To search within a category of recipes, such as 'Fruit Smoothies', the category must first be selected from the browse page. Once the category is selected you will see a link on the top right of the page allowing you to search within that category.

If you are looking for a particular recipe and are finding it difficult to find, we suggest searching without a category selected. Categorizing a recipe based on the information we have can be very subjective and frankly, we're not particularly good at it yet. Many more recipes may exist that should match the category you are interested in, than we will return on a category search.

Reasons to Enable Javascript

Your browser does not have Javascript enabled for this website. If possible, enabling javascript will improve your experience of this website in subtle and non-intrusive ways. Ingredient entry is aided by auto-complete, speeding up finding the ingredient you want. Recipe categories can be selected from a list on the main search page, rather than having to select a category from the browse recipe section. A personal store cupboard or diet profile can be created to help finding the recipes you want. Enabling Javascript also speeds up the general operation of the website for your benefit.

Other Website Resources

Look at our links page for other websites you may find useful.

Having Problems?

If you believe we are not responding to your searches correctly or you notice some other problem with the site, please contact us and we will do our best to rectify the problem. Include your email address if you require feedback.

Recipe Website Administrators

If you are the administrator of a recipe website you should view our webmaster page.

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