Hello everyone, we just launched Gusteau, the most advanced recipe search engine and cooking companion on the market. Yes yes, I know what a lot of people may be thinking, “oh no, not another recipe app…” I get it, it’s a pretty common idea for a first project for a lot of people, the problem is that it sounds like an easy thing to do, but it’s actually incredibly difficult to get (almost) perfect - consistently. The idea for this came up essentially in the same way I imagine most people come up with this, which is the absolute frustration it is to search for a recipe, have to read everything about the history for it only to eventually find yourself at the bottom of the page which pops up ads every two seconds and moves the screen up and down while you’re trying to figure out how much 3 cups of spinach is and how and why do I now have to put spinach in a cup. So, to the point, what makes this the best? * The most advanced recipe search engine around: One thing that really frustrates me about existing recipe apps is that they still make you do the searching on the web, then copy and paste the link into it to get it imported. I’m lazy, I don’t like switching apps and I like having everything I need in one place. Hopefully, I’m not the only one. Furthermore, we’ve got filters like diet and nutritional focus (high protein, low fat, etc) which make it pretty great for people really focused on what they eat. It’s hard to get this type of search experience even from google, and apps which use some third party search services just don’t have enough recipes for them to be useful. We have all of the recipes available online, even some deleted ones. Currently we only fully support recipes written in English. Non-english recipes will work but it is experimental for now. * Using the recipes: The way we parse the recipes into the app is, compared to every competitor app I’ve tried, by far the best one. I’m not saying it to brag but it’s true. I tried using them, but they just don’t work good enough! Some examples: * Most apps fail to get the “Ingredient Groups” of recipes. A lot of recipes sites have their ingredients under headings like “For the sauce” or “For the Salmon”, then reference them as such in the instructions. In an app like this where I don’t have the same grouping structure, I read in the instruction “mix the sauce ingredients” and then I don’t know which ingredients belong to the sauce, forcing me to go to the recipe’s website and ruining the point of the app in the first place. * We have all the crucial decision-making information other apps do not have: Reviews, videos, estimated cost of the meal, detailed nutrition macros and author’s notes. * Each Instruction highlights both time references and ingredient references, which when tapped will present a helpful tooltip that will start a timer or give you the ingredient information at a glance. Some apps do this, but those that do are not good enough. Sometimes two quantities of an ingredient will be mentioned twice (like in the example above, 1 clove of garlic might be mentioned for the sauce, and then another 3 for the salmon) and the app will just show you the first one. Not to mention, very often the instructions will mention an ingredient not exactly by name and the apps will fail to detect it. We made a hardcore algorithm that includes some heavy data science and AI to make it perfect. * For the non-US people: A lot of recipe websites are written by Americans, which unfortunately makes cooking very annoying for those used to the metric system. Not only do we convert ingredient amounts better than everybody else, we also give the units to you in understandable quantities. For liquid ingredients, you’ll get ml, for solid ingredients you will get the weight equivalent of the ingredient. To use the example above, 3 cups of spinach will convert into 90 grams of spinach in the metric system. * No hassle: I don’t like apps that make me do a 10-step questionnaire about what kind of food I like to eat for breakfast. Just give me the product you have with minimal friction. Gusteau is designed exactly with this in mind: simplicity and ease-of-use. You get exactly what you need, when you need it. * Great design and user experience: I wanted to make things as simple and useful as possible. The whole app is designed with a focus on making your cooking life easier while also looking great (IMO). Also, it’s available on both iOS and Android in equal quality, which I can’t say is true for most of the competitor apps. I really think that we’ve achieved the best experience for people who love to cook, of course time will tell. I hope everybody that tries it here will agree. Sorry for the long post, I’ve been working on this for months and finally reaching this step is very exciting and I wanted to share everything. For early adopters, we are offering lifetime access to Gusteau, pay once, no subscription, access forever. This will also enable you to collaborate with us if you wish, on how the product will develop over time. We have a special section for early adopters to give us feature suggestions on what to include. This won’t last too long, so thank you to anybody who joins us early. TLDR: Gusteau is a new recipe app that aims to solve common recipe search frustrations. Key features: * Most advanced recipe search engine with diet/nutrition filters that searches all online recipes * Contain ALL of a recipe’s important info - Ingredients, Instructions, Videos, Notes, Reviews, Nutrition, Price, etc. * Superior recipe parsing that correctly handles ingredient groups, quantities, and unit conversions * Smart ingredient detection in instructions with built-in timers and tooltips * Clean, beautifully designed simple interface * Available on both iOS and Android * Currently offering lifetime access for early adopters PS. For anybody interested in the development journey of this, I will probably make a post soon about my experience building this because it was surprisingly insanely difficult and I think some people might find it useful both from the data-science side, and the frontend (react-native) side. Also if you have any questions about anything technical in the app I’d be happy to answer. Please give it a try! LINKS iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gu... Android: https://play.google.com/store/ap...

Gusteau

Anyone can cook!

Anyone can cook!