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Recipes & Mealie

Pantrie connects to your Mealie instance to show which of your recipes you can actually make from what's in your inventory — and to push the missing ingredients straight to a Mealie shopping list.

Connecting Mealie

A household admin sets up the connection once:

  1. Go to Settings → Household Settings → Mealie Connection.
  2. Enter your Mealie base URL (e.g. https://mealie.example.com) and a Mealie API key.
  3. Save. The key is stored encrypted and never shown back to you.

This is the Pantrie → Mealie direction

The Mealie Connection is how Pantrie reads recipes from Mealie. It's separate from API Clients (Settings → Household → API Clients), which let an external app read Pantrie's inventory. See Mealie Integration for that direction.

The Recipes page

Open Recipes from the inventory page header. Pantrie pulls your recipes from Mealie and, for each one, compares its ingredients against your inventory:

  • Can make — every ingredient is in stock (or covered by a household staple).
  • Missing N — N ingredients aren't in stock; they're listed on the card.

Each card also shows how many ingredients are in stock out of the total (e.g. 4/6 ingredients in stock).

If you belong to more than one household, a selector lets you switch which household's inventory the recipes are checked against.

Fuzzy ingredient matching

Ingredient names rarely match your inventory exactly, so matching is forgiving:

  • Spacing and case differences are ignored — inventory "Corn Starch" satisfies a recipe calling for "cornstarch".
  • Simple plurals collapse — "Tomatoes" matches "tomato".
  • A more specific item covers a generic one — having "olive oil" satisfies "oil".

Matching is deliberately conservative, so unrelated near-misses (e.g. corn vs cornstarch) are not treated as the same thing.

Household staples

Some ingredients you always have — water, salt, oil — and you don't want them cluttering every recipe's "missing" list. Staples are a per-household list of assumed-on-hand ingredients that are always counted as in-stock.

  • Manage them under Settings → Household → Pantry Staples.
  • Every household starts with water already added; add or remove others freely.
  • A staple is matched with the same fuzzy logic as inventory, so it's treated as in-stock and never appears in a recipe's missing list or a shopping-list push.

Pushing missing ingredients to a shopping list

On any recipe with missing ingredients, click Add missing to Mealie list to open the push dialog:

  1. Pick a list — choose any existing Mealie shopping list, or
  2. Create a new one — the name is pre-filled as <Recipe Name> - DD-MM-YY (e.g. Chana Masala - 23-06-26) and is editable before you confirm.
  3. Click Add to list.

Pantrie reports how many items were applied (e.g. added 4/4).

No duplicates — quantities are merged

Before adding, Pantrie checks what's already on the target list. If an ingredient is already there (matched with the same fuzzy logic), its quantity is incremented instead of creating a duplicate line. So pushing the same recipe twice, or two recipes that share an ingredient, consolidates cleanly — the result also notes how many existing items were updated (e.g. added 4/4 (1 updated)).

Troubleshooting

No Mealie connection configured

If the Recipes page reports there's no connection, an admin needs to add one under Settings → Household Settings → Mealie Connection.

Recipe shows missing items you actually have

Check the exact inventory item name, or add the ingredient as a household staple if it's something you always keep on hand.

Wrong shopping list

The dialog lets you pick the target list every time, so you can keep separate lists (e.g. Weekly, Costco) and choose per push.