How to use Salt & Temper

Paste a whole recipe into the box, instructions and all. We read out just the ingredient lines, so a title, the method steps, and any notes are fine to leave in. The servings box fills in on its own from the recipe's stated yield, or, when none is given, from an estimate the engine backs out of the total calories. You can type your own count any time to re-portion everything live.

Press Get verified macros. Each ingredient is matched to a food in USDA FoodData Central, your amounts are converted to grams, and the macros are summed by code. What comes back is a per-serving panel and a line-by-line breakdown.

The breakdown is where you check our work. For each line you can see:

• The matched USDA food, the grams we converted it to, and the calories it contributed.
• A system picked badge when more than one food fit and the engine chose. If it picked wrong, open wrong? see matches to swap in the right one.
• A closest match label when the food we found is a reasonable proxy rather than an exact hit.
• A not counted note on no-quantity seasonings like salt and pepper to taste, which carry no meaningful macros.
• enter macros on any line, so you can supply numbers by hand for an ingredient we could not match confidently.

When a match is not confident, we leave it out of the total and say so rather than quietly reporting a number we cannot defend. That is the point of Step 1: the headline macros are ones you can stand behind.

Step 2 works on the same recipe. Start by picking a nutrition lifestyle, or skip straight to the numbers. A lifestyle sets a starting macro split, anchors the macro it cares about, and tailors the kind of swaps the engine will make. Each one has a short explainer behind the info icon, and a full write-up of how we interpret it.

The four boxes are your per-serving target: calories, protein, fat, and carbs. They seed from what Step 1 measured, so you are nudging real numbers, not starting from zero. Use the small lock next to a macro to hold it exactly. You can lock up to two. The engine holds the locked macros and moves the rest to get as close as it can. There are optional dietary styles (gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan) that act as a hard constraint on every swap, plus boxes to list ingredients to avoid and notes for the chef.

Press Propose changes. The engine proposes ingredient swaps, then recomputes the real macros of its own proposal and shows you a Was, Proposed, and Target comparison so you can see exactly where it landed before anything is applied.

Nothing is committed until you say so. Each line is a swap, an add, a removal, or a keep, with the engine's reasoning underneath. Approve the ones you like, keep your original where you would rather, or override with your own wording. Then commit with Apply as-is, or Apply & close the gap to let the engine run another pass toward the locked targets.

The final result is grounded the same way Step 1 is. When the dish lands inside your tolerance, you get a clear within-target panel. When a target is not reachable while keeping the dish coherent, we do not fudge it. We show the closest honest result and explain why, with a concrete suggestion and a one-click button to set your target to what is actually reachable.

The re-engineered recipe comes with its cooking method rewritten to match the new ingredients, including adjusted temperatures and times. You can scale the result to any number of servings and print a clean copy to cook from.

• Macros are estimates for general information, not medical or dietary advice, and ingredient swaps are suggestions, not allergen-safety guarantees. Always check ingredients against your own needs.
• The demo is free and rate-limited. If you hit a limit, wait a bit and try again.
• Editing the recipe text or the servings in Step 1 carries straight through to Step 2, since both steps work on the same dish.