The HomeCook's Playbook

This project explores how the experience of using flavor-pairing resources like The Flavor Bible can be reimagined as a mobile app to better support home cooks in the kitchen.

When I needed kitchen inspiration, I found myself turning to TikTok and YouTube more often than my cookbooks. With endless free content from creators around the world, it’s easy to get swept up in trying new dishes and unfamiliar ingredients. What started as casual recipe browsing quickly led to a pantry stocked with one-off specialty items. As someone who rarely repeats meals, I began searching for creative ways to use what I already had on hand. This challenge inspired The Homecooks Playbook — a tool designed to help home cooks make the most of their ingredients and explore new meals with ease.

Overview

How do home cooks stay inspired in the kitchen?

To try new flavours? To use up specialty ingredients? To use up old groceries?

Project Type

Role

Tools

Duration

Mobile App Prototype

User Research

Wireframing

Prototyping

May- Aug 2023

Figma

Glide

Passionate home cooks enjoy exploring new cuisines and flavors, but often struggle to use unfamiliar ingredients without needing to buy additional items for yet another recipe. Budget limitations and a desire to reduce food waste make it difficult to create new, satisfying meals with what they already have in their kitchens.

The Problem

A flavour-pairing mobile app inspired by reference books like The Flavour Bible, designed to support home cooks in experimenting with new cuisines. By offering intuitive search and filtering tools, the app helps users make the most of the ingredients they already have, turning kitchen experimentation into a more accessible and enjoyable experience.

The Solution

Comparative Analysis

What tools/apps currently exist to address this demand?

Research

Does a flavour-pairing tool already exist?

Yes — flavor pairing tools do exist, with the most well-known being The Flavor Bible by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen A. Page. Widely used by professional chefs, it’s considered an essential reference for culinary creativity and recipe development. While there is clear demand for a digital, user-friendly version of this resource, especially for use on the go, no official Flavor Bible app currently exists. Here are quotes from cooking forums that highlight users’ desire for a tool like this.

Anyone who knows a good flavor pairing app by any chance? I love the flavor bible for example but the book is not that portable so I’m looking for something more on the spot accessible.”

“Somebody should make a digital,cross reference-able version of [the Flavor Bible], so that your could plug in any number of combinations of main ingredients or spices or sauces, and see what kind of output you get for those that overlap each other.”

“I'm on the go and am curious about something that would pair well with something else and then end up forgetting to look when I get home. Are there any good flavor pairing websites that I can use when I don't have immediate access to the book?”

Below, I compare the strengths and weaknesses of some existing online food pairing search engine tools. Overall, I found that most alternatives demonstrate a simple search and filtering solution to food pairings but the design of this feature is often unintuitive/ difficult to use. Moreover, most tools lack the ability to save desired pairings. These are some features I kept in when deciding on central features to build in the prototype.

Traditional R&D tools such as books like the Flavor Bible may not offer all the possible flavour-pairings of exotic ingredients.
The linear structure of a book makes it difficult to filter ingredients by category, ie seasonality.
Content dense books are not portable and accessible for spontaneous recipe R&D when not at home.

What are the main pain points with traditional recipe R&D mediums?

Initial findings

Despite the wide range of cooking and recipe apps available, many fall short in supporting ingredient-led exploration — especially for home cooks experimenting with unfamiliar items. Most of these apps focused on full recipes and overlook the needs of home cooks who want to experiment with what they already have.

All in all, the competitive analysis revealed a gap: few tools support flexible, ingredient-specific exploration without requiring extra purchases. These key insight guided the development of features that move away from rigid, recipe-first formats and instead support ingredient-first exploration and creativity. Below, I’ve outline some central features to focus on in the MVP; an ingredient-based search bar, an efficient filtering system and a 'save pairing' feature.

Identifying user wants, needs and goals

Defining the problem

Pairings

3 selected items

Available Pairing Options:

Ingredient #1

Ingredient #3

Ingredient #2

Ingredient Pairing Option #1

Ingredient Pairing Option #2

Ingredient Pairing Option #3

Ingredient #5

Ingredient #4

Ingredient #3

Ingredient #2

Ingredient #1