A recipe is one fixed set of quantities for one fixed set of choices. Real cooking is rarely that tidy. You have shin instead of chuck, or a slow cooker instead of an afternoon, or six people instead of four, and the recipe carries on telling you what somebody else did.
A recipe builder asks what you actually have and writes the recipe round it. Every quantity is rescaled, the method is rewritten to match, and each choice explains what it changes and why. All free, nothing to sign up for, and nothing leaves your browser.
The Builders
Bigos Builder
Build your own Polish hunter’s stew step by step. Choose the meats, the sourness and the method, and get a full recipe scaled to your table.Open the builder →Japanese Curry Builder
Choose the dish, the protein, how thick you want it and one secret ingredient. Scaled to your table, with the usual mistakes flagged before you make them.Open the builder →Beef Bourguignon Builder
Pick the cut, the pork and the aromatics, and whether you cook it on the hob, in the oven or in a slow cooker. Every quantity scales and the method is rewritten to match.Open the builder →Salad Builder
Leafy, grain, pasta, potato or slaw. Pick a direction and a dressing and it works out every weight, the herbs included, which is the one thing recipes always leave you to guess.Open the builder →Thai Curry Paste Builder
Red, green, yellow, massaman or panang from my own recipes, with how much paste goes in the curry worked out from what is in the pot, and a version for when you cannot get galangal.Open the builder →How a Builder Differs From a Recipe
A recipe hands you the answer. A builder shows you the working, which matters because most of what goes wrong in a kitchen is a substitution nobody warned you about.
Change the cut on the bourguignon and the braising time moves with it, because shin carries more connective tissue than chuck and needs longer to give it up. Ask the curry builder for a thicker sauce and the fat rises with the flour, because a roux short of fat goes to dry crumbs. Take the celery out of a keema and the onion goes up to replace the bulk you removed. None of that is a footnote; it is the recipe changing shape.
The other half is what a builder refuses to do. It will not put minced prawns in a keema, or offer a slow cooker for a batch no domestic slow cooker will hold, or let two proteins quietly become half a portion each without saying so.
What You Can Change
Roughly five to fifteen questions each, depending on the dish, and none of them is decoration. The bigos builder asks which meats, how sour, and whether it goes in the oven, on the hob or in a slow cooker. The curry builder asks the dish first, because that decides what form the protein takes. The bourguignon builder asks the cut, the pork, the aromatics and the cooking method, and lets you type in the exact weight of beef the shop actually sold you. The salad builder asks for a structure and a direction and then works out every weight, herbs included, which is the one thing recipes always leave you to guess. The curry paste builder asks which paste, what is going in the pot and whether you have galangal, then works out how much paste the curry takes.
Where the Numbers Come From
Four of the five are anchored to recipes I have cooked and published: the bigos, the Japanese potato curry, the beef bourguignon, and for the curry pastes my Thai fish and prawn curry, Thai yellow chicken curry and chicken massaman. Each one is anchored to that recipe: it is the base the calculations are built from, and a test checks the defaults against it every time I change anything. A couple of defaults depart from the card on purpose, where the card format could not carry the technique - each builder’s own FAQ says where and why.
The salad builder is the exception and it is worth saying why. There is no single salad recipe to anchor to, so its quantities come from published recipes measured and compared: dressing per head by the shape of the salad, grain and pasta by dry weight, leaves, protein and crunch each from their own set. Where no source covers something, the figure is mine and the tool says so where it quotes it.
Why the Explanations Are the Point
The thing readers mention is not the recipe. It is the reasoning attached to it.
I appreciate all the explanations of what the ingredients are doing. It’s like having a more experienced cook right there with me.
A reader, on the bigos builder
That is the whole design. A builder that only spat out numbers would be a calculator, and there are kitchen calculators here for the jobs that genuinely are just arithmetic.
FAQ for the Recipe Builders
Do I need an account?
No. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay. What you build is kept in your own browser so it is still there when you come back, and it never reaches me.
Can I share what I built?
Yes. Every builder gives you a link that carries your exact build, so whoever opens it sees your version rather than the default. You can print it too, and the print view leaves out everything except the recipe.
Are these tested recipes?
The bigos, Japanese curry, bourguignon and Thai curry paste builders are anchored to recipes I have cooked and published - that is what the defaults are built from and checked against, though a couple of them use a technique the card format could not carry, explained on the builder’s own page. Once you start changing things you are past what I have personally cooked, which is why the reasoning is attached to every choice rather than hidden.
Why does it sometimes refuse an option?
Because the combination does not work. A slow cooker cannot hold twenty hearty portions, a keema is a minced meat dish so there is no seafood version, and a salad cannot carry two centrepiece proteins without both portions becoming too small to taste. The builder says why rather than just hiding the option.
Can I switch between metric and US measures?
Yes, on every builder, and it converts the method as well as the shopping list. A US reader gets inches and Fahrenheit in the steps, not just ounces in the ingredients.
Will there be more builders?
Yes. Which ones depends partly on what people use, so if there is a dish you would want to build rather than follow, the comment box on any of them reaches me directly.