You have the recipes. That was never the problem. The problem is that it’s mealtime, everyone’s hungry, and you’re standing in front of a library you built yourself with no idea what to make from it.
Decision Mode is our answer. It shipped today in version 0.16.0, and it does one thing: It helps you pick your next meal from your own recipes, quickly.
Four doors into one decision
Open Decision Mode and you get four ways in, depending on what you actually know at that moment:
- What’s in your kitchen. Pick from ingredients that show up across your recipes, and see what uses them.
- What sounds good. Choose a cuisine or a category you’re in the mood for.
- How much time you have. Pick a time bucket and see what fits.
- Just pick for me. Sometimes the answer to “what do you want?” is “I want someone else to decide.” This door shuffles your dinner recipes and hands you one. Don’t like it? Reshuffle.
Whichever door you take, you get three suggestions, not thirty. You can narrow further from there, adding an ingredient, a cuisine, or a time limit, until something looks right. Three is deliberate. A wall of options is the problem Decision Mode exists to solve, not the solution.
Everything comes from your library
The ingredient options, the cuisines, the categories are all derived from your saved recipes. There’s no external catalog, no “trending near you,” no seasonal push from us.
Decision Mode doesn’t watch what you do, build a profile, or guess what you’ll like. It asks you a question, and it filters your own recipes by your answer. Every suggestion on the screen traces back to a choice you just made, and you can see exactly which one. The whole thing runs on your device. Nothing about your evening’s indecision is sent anywhere.
Decision Mode is only as good as your library. If you have a dozen recipes, three suggestions will feel repetitive. It gets better the more of your scattered recipes you bring in, which is rather the point of the app.
Where to find it
Look for the card on your Dashboard, or the “Help me decide” button in My Recipes. It works in all nine languages, with full keyboard and screen reader support.
Let us know what you think and how we can make it better.
— Joe