cook with what you've got.
SwapCook answers a single question: what can I substitute for X when making Y? It's the most-searched pattern in home cooking, and most answers online are either too generic (“use applesauce”) or too niche (restaurant-chef substitutions that assume a pantry you don't have).
We built a score for every (base ingredient, substitute, context) triple — ranking options not by popularity but by how well each swap preserves the actual function of the ingredient in the specific dish you're making.
how the data is built
- Ingredients and nutrition come from USDA FoodData Central (Foundation + SR Legacy + FNDDS) and OpenFoodFacts — 1,140 canonical ingredients with 100-gram nutrition baselines.
- Substitution rules start with university extension research (Utah State, Iowa State, Oregon State), USDA Food and Nutrition Service, and curated cooking sources. The balance of the 3,649 swaps are LLM-generated and auditor-reviewed.
- Use-case scoring (does applesauce work for baking? for frying?) is generated per (sub, use-case) with explicit function-match rules, then audited for misattributions.
- Dish-level content (1,064 pages) is written one ingredient at a time with a confusable-pair contrast check — so the cake page and the cookies page read differently, even for the same ingredient.
what SwapCook isn't
We don't target professional chefs, food scientists, or dietitians. We don't sell groceries, run ads on content, or require an account. The substitution dataset is released under CC BY 4.0 — cite SwapCook and re-use it however you like.