About Salt & Temper

If you eat to specific macros, an arbitrary recipe is a black box. Most tools either tell you nutrition facts or generate a recipe from scratch. Almost none take the dish you actually want to cook and reshape it to your targets while keeping it coherent and worth eating.

We wanted that middle path: keep the recipe, change the numbers. Swap an ingredient, adjust an amount, rewrite the method to match, and show you macros you can stand behind.

A language model is good at reading messy recipe text and reasoning about food. It is not a calculator, and it should never be the source of a number you rely on. So we split the work along that line.

The model reads your recipe and normalizes each ingredient into a clean food and an amount. Then code takes over: it looks each food up in a bundled copy of USDA FoodData Central, converts your amounts to grams, and sums the macros with plain arithmetic. The model handles language. Code and USDA handle the numbers.

Re-engineering runs the same way. The model proposes ingredient swaps in the spirit of the nutrition lifestyle you chose, then code recomputes the real macros and checks them against your target. If it is off, the loop tries again. You see the grounded result, not a promise.

A generic food database cannot perfectly match every cuisine and every specialty ingredient. When a match is not confident, we would rather say so than quietly report a number we cannot defend. Uncertain matches are flagged and left out of the total until you confirm or correct them, so the headline macros stay trustworthy.

That is the whole point. The value here is numbers you can trust, which means being clear about the few we cannot.

Salt & Temper is early. The single-recipe demo is live and free to try. We are building toward saved recipes, accounts, and more nutrition lifestyles. If that sounds useful, join the waitlist on the home page and we will be in touch.