Cooklist: Pantry Meals Recipes

This is the worst meal prep subscription I’ve used! The pantry entry is decent enough but the meals are terrible. It feels like they have a bot scrapping the internet for recipes then doing a horrible time transferring the ingredients and instructions to their format. The first three meals I tried to cook, all highly rated, had ingredients in the steps that weren’t in the list so I didn’t shop for them. The alternative suggestions were ok but skipped very obvious ones I had. Example I needed black pepper powder and it suggested lemon pepper when I had fine ground black pepper in the app’s pantry. If this is all you used I suggest try any other similar app so you can gauge for yourself. I have 5 others I would recommend before this one.

I downloaded this hoping it would do what I already do manually via notion which is track my pantry and suggest recipes that I can make with what is going bad. I didn’t need the extra features of the self ordering system as we eat as clean as possible so I can’t speak to that. What I can speak to is the fact that there desperately needs to be some regulation to this app. I love the open source everyone can add everything idea, but one database doesn’t need 100 entries for say garlic powder. This leads to the items that you input not being recognized for what they are unless you find the “cooklist default” entry. The next big problem is that half of the recipes are not completed either with ingredients or directions. So for example: for medical reasons I have to eat keto, but when recipes aren’t imputed into the system correctly things that are not keto in the slightest pop up. I was being given recipes that were “keto” but there were missing ingredients tricking the system into thinking it’s a keto recipe when it’s a recipe for garlic breadsticks because someone didn’t input frozen dough… If this app had a review protocol before anything was finalized and pushed to it would probably be amazing, but it is way too clunky and unreliable for my taste and especially not for $60 for the year. It might be amazing for people without restrictive eating, but make sure you’re checking that the recipes are complete and entered in correctly. Incredible idea, but do away with the lazy self ordering system, add some checks and balances and then you’d have a killer app.