Find what to use when you're out of an ingredient.
A tool built out of kitchen frustration — and a lot of curiosity.
It starts the same way every time. You find a recipe you want to try — something from a food blog in the US, a cookbook from the UK, a video from someone cooking in Canada. The instructions look straightforward until you hit an ingredient you don't recognise.
Is cornstarch the same as cornflour? Is heavy cream what I know as thickened cream or double cream? Does baking soda mean the same thing as bicarbonate of soda?
Sometimes it's the same product with a different name. Sometimes it's subtly different and swapping them 1:1 will ruin the dish. The answer is rarely obvious, and searching the web usually sends you down a rabbit hole of conflicting forum posts and vague answers.
Even when you know exactly what an ingredient is, sometimes you simply don't have it. Maybe it's a Sunday evening and the shops are shut. Maybe the recipe calls for something you can only find at a specialty store that's forty minutes away — or doesn't exist in your town at all.
That moment of standing in the kitchen, halfway through a recipe, wondering whether you can push on or whether the whole thing is ruined — that's a frustrating place to be. And it happens more than it should.
Most of the time, there is something in your pantry that will work. You just need to know what it is, how much to use, and whether it matters for this particular dish.
I built Substitute Ingredient because I kept running into both of these problems and couldn't find a single tool that solved them cleanly. Everything I found was either too generic, too American-centric, or buried the answer in a wall of text.
I wanted something fast and practical: type in the ingredient, tell it where you are, get a clear answer. No fluff, no scrolling past three paragraphs of history before you find out what to actually use.
I also wanted it to be honest about country differences. An Australian tablespoon is 20ml, not 15ml. Cream terminology is completely different depending on where you live. These details matter when you're baking, and most tools just ignore them.
My goal is to make this as useful and accessible as possible for everyone — whether you're an experienced cook or someone just starting out, wherever you are in the world. If you've ever felt stuck in the kitchen because of a confusing ingredient, this was built for you.