Posted on Monday, June 30th, 2014 by Will Hagle
Spoonacular helps users discover the best, healthiest, most popular and cheapest dishes of any type.
Spoonacular is a recipe site that makes it simple to search for the meals you want to cook and easy to discover how to prepare them. 
The site claims to have “the best recipe search ever,” and its search function certainly is better than most other online cookbooks. While many online recipe sites can be limited by chefs or restaurants or featured recommendations, Spoonacular returns a list of results no matter what you enter into the search bar. The results are also filtered by categories. If you search for “Chicken soup,” for instance, Spoonacular automatically pulls three results across three categories: The Best, The Healthiest, and The Cheapest (Southwestern Chicken Soup, Ginger Chicken Soup and Easy Chicken Noodle Soup, respectively). There’s then a lengthier list of more general results. The recipes can also be filtered by cuisine, diet, intolerances, type, occasion, price and time. 
After clicking on a particular recipe, detailed information about how to prepare it is displayed. There are pictures, preparation times, and costs per serving, which includes a detailed price breakdown. Spoonacular truly takes an extra step in providing its visitors with comprehensive information regarding not just the entire recipe — but each specific ingredient. This helps users understand the exact health (and taste!) benefits of the recipe they have chosen. 
There’s even a “Green tips” section that helps environmentally-conscious cooks make sustainable choices. Each of these extra features are accompanied with graphical information, and those charts and graphs can be used as embedded widgets on the blogs of chefs or restaurants. Spoonacular hosts a “Recipe Toolkit” for that purpose, allowing users to build their own widgets with specific information. For established chefs and aspiring cooks alike, Spoonacular is the perfect destination to find new recipes and understand everything about the ingredients that go into them.
