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🍳 Recipe & Meal Intelligence — Structured Recipe Data for Apps & Meal Planners

Get clean, structured recipe data — ingredients with measures, step-by-step instructions, cuisine, category, photo and a YouTube tutorial link — for hundreds of meals, with no scraping and no API key. Search by name, ingredient, cuisine or category, or pull random recipes for discovery features. Every recipe comes back as one tidy row, ready to drop into a cooking app, meal planner or shopping-list generator. Export to JSON/CSV/Excel, run on a schedule, call via API, or connect to Make, Zapier or n8n.

🍽️ What is the Recipe & Meal Intelligence?

It turns a public recipe database (TheMealDB) into a structured dataset you can build products on. Tell it how to search — by recipe name, main ingredient, meal category, cuisine/area, or random — and it returns full recipes with a parsed ingredients array (each ingredient paired with its measure), so meal-planning tools, food blogs and AI cooking assistants get ready-to-use data instead of messy HTML. No paid subscription, no key, no parsing.

What data does it extract?

• Recipe name and stable meal id
• Category (Beef, Chicken, Dessert, Vegetarian, etc.) and area/cuisine (Italian, Mexican, Indian…)
• Full cooking instructions (step-by-step text)
• Structured ingredients — each item paired with its measure (e.g. soy sauce / 3/4 cup)
• ingredients_list (names only) and an ingredients_count for quick filtering
• Recipe photo (image thumbnail URL)
• tags array and a YouTube tutorial URL when available
• source_url to the original recipe and an extracted_at timestamp

Because the data comes from a public recipe API rather than a scraped page, the output is consistent every time — the same fields, the same structured ingredients shape, and no broken layouts to clean up before you import it.

⬇️ Input

Pick a search mode and optional filters, then run — no key or login required:

Example input

{
"searchType":"category",
"category":"Dessert",
"maxResults":50
}

⬆️ Output

Every recipe is one clean row (view as a table, or export JSON / CSV / Excel):

{
"id":"52772",
"name":"Teriyaki Chicken Casserole",
"category":"Chicken",
"area":"Japanese",
"instructions":"Preheat oven to 350°F. In a small bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, water, brown sugar...",
"image":"https://www.themealdb.com/images/media/meals/wvpsxx1468256321.jpg",
"tags":["Meat","Casserole"],
"youtube_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aZr5hZXP_s",
"source_url":"https://www.example.com/teriyaki-chicken-casserole",
"ingredients":[
{"ingredient":"soy sauce","measure":"3/4 cup"},
{"ingredient":"water","measure":"1/2 cup"},
{"ingredient":"brown sugar","measure":"1/4 cup"}
],
"ingredients_count":12,
"ingredients_list":["soy sauce","water","brown sugar"],
"extracted_at":"2026-06-26T15:30:00"
}

💡 Use cases

• 📱 Cooking & recipe apps: populate your catalog with structured recipes, photos and ingredient lists in minutes.
• 🗓️ Meal-planning tools: generate weekly menus by cuisine and category, then auto-build shopping lists from the ingredients array.
• 🤖 AI cooking assistants: ground LLM answers in real recipes instead of hallucinated ingredients and steps.
• ✍️ Food blogs & nutrition platforms: source recipe ideas and clean ingredient data for content and diet tracking.

❓ FAQ

How do I search for recipes? Choose a searchType (name, ingredient, category, area or random) and a searchQuery or filter, then run. You get full recipes with ingredients, instructions and photos.

Are ingredients structured or just plain text? Structured. Each ingredient is returned as an object paired with its measure, and you also get a flat ingredients_list and an ingredients_count for easy parsing and shopping lists.

Do I need an API key? No. There is no key, login or token — just pick a search mode and run.

Can I filter by cuisine or diet? Yes. Use searchType: "area" (or the area filter) for cuisines like Italian or Indian, and category for types like Vegetarian, Vegan, Seafood or Dessert.

Is there a video tutorial link? Many recipes include a youtube_url to a step-by-step cooking video, plus a source_url to the original recipe.

How many recipes can it return? Up to your maxResults cap (1–200). Random search returns up to 10 recipes per run for discovery.

How fresh is the data? Each run fetches live from the source, so any new or updated recipes are reflected automatically.

Can I run it on a schedule or via API? Yes. Schedule recurring runs in Apify, call it via the API/SDK, or connect it to Make, Zapier or n8n to keep your recipe catalog updated.

Is it legal? It retrieves recipe data from a publicly available, openly licensed recipe database. Use it responsibly for your apps and content, and respect source attribution where required.

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Keywords: recipe scraper, recipe API, meal data, recipe database, ingredients with measures, cooking instructions, meal planning API, food blog data, recipe search by ingredient, cuisine filter, TheMealDB alternative, structured recipes, shopping list generator, nutrition data, cooking app data.