Spin-It: All of My Ingredient Swaps, Now Searchable

an online tool for universal ingredient substitutions

No spaghetti? No problem.

Hello Disco Balls,

Today’s news? Yuuuuge.

When I first started working on recipes for Where Cooking Begins, there was a day when I realized I did not have the onion that I thought I had. This was very annoying: it interrupted my work flow, but worse, could force me to put on outside shoes and go to the store.

Absolutely not. I used the leek that I had instead of the onion I didn’t, which is a normal thing that all cooks do all the time. When I sat down to actually write the recipe, I had to make a choice. Do I call for the originally-intended onion, or for the leek that stood in that night? I wanted to do both.

Inadvertently, I’d tossed myself into an existential crisis. If a leek could be an onion that time, what did that mean for onions in general? Eventually, I decided that it would be borderline dishonest for me to write any recipe without acknowledging that the same dish could be made well with many alternate ingredients. Because I am stubborn and dogmatic, I didn’t want to add options to some of my recipes: if I was going to do it, I would do it for them all.

That’s how Spin It started. I codified this ingredient fluidity in Where Cooking Begins, and then again for That Sounds So Good, and in every new recipe I published and video I filmed. Not every ingredient has a Spin—but a lot of them do—a reminder that the world is your oyster, and if you don’t like oysters, the world is your clam.

A still from one of my videos, spinning beans like nobody’s biz.

There are lots of reasons to Spin It: it helps you use up things you’ve already purchased, which reduces food waste and saves money. Maybe you don’t eat a certain food, but aren’t sure if you can make the recipe with the ingredient you prefer. All food aversions are welcome here!

Cooks who are still amassing experience might feel reassured that they can use something other than what the recipe says. Experienced cooks may recognize themselves in the instinct to riff, interpret, and go off-script. Making adjustments based on what you have on hand or to suit your palate is the mark of a resourceful and confident cook—and if I have been helpful in that pursuit—well, yay.

Until now, my Spin Its lived in the dozens of original recipes I’ve published here, along with the 175 dishes in Where Cooking Begins and That Sounds So Good.

[movie trailer voice]: That’s all about to change.

Today, I’m releasing a digital, searchable tool that you can use to look up every Spin It I’ve ever called for in any of my recipes.

Unlike some random web query or using an AI tool, my Spin It search gives you access to my brain—my work, my experiments, my experience, my skill set, my food knowledge, and my personal suggestions.

Here’s how to use this database of knowledge to cook confidently from any recipe—not just my own.

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Scrubbing each one of my recipes to create this database, and the additional work that went into building, designing, and editing the tool took (human!) time and (my actual!) money. To access and use it, please become a paid subscriber.