Kitchen & Bar

On this phone

How to get around

The bar under the name is the map. Swipe it sideways if a destination sits off-screen. On Tonight, the button pinned to the bottom cooks the lead dish.

  1. Tonight — What you can cook first, plus drinks that fit the same shelf.

  2. This week — Five dinners from the shelf, urgent things cooked first.

  3. Shelf — Edit what you actually own.

  4. Written methods — Every dish and drink with a method somebody wrote out.

  5. The pantry — Start from one ingredient: what it does, and everything built on it.

  6. Out of it — What to use instead, judged by the job the missing thing was doing.

  7. Photo review — Review a demo shelf photo and confirm every item before adding it.

  8. Flavor Lab — Pairings with a track record: classic matches and the mixology behind them.

  9. Wild cards — Combinations with no tradition behind them, only shared aroma notes.

  10. Send to Occasion OS — Prepare confirmed shelf availability for Occasion OS.

  11. The field — The gap this layer owns.

Keep it on the home screen

  1. iPhone — tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
  2. Android — open the browser menu, then Install app or Add to Home screen.

After that it opens as Kitchen & Bar, not a browser tab. Inventory stays on this device.

Substitutions · 89 dishes here use it

Out of pasta

The sauce finishes on the pasta, not the other way around. Undercook it by a minute, move it into the pan with a ladle of its water, and let the starch pull the sauce onto it.

Everything below is judged against that job. A swap that covers it is a swap; one that only looks similar is not.

5 of the 89 dishes here that mention pasta list it as optional — 6% of them. In those, the correct substitution is nothing.

What to reach for

Instead · 1

a different pasta shape

by weight

What it gets you
Nearly everything, as long as the shape suits the sauce — long strands for slick sauces, tubes and twists for chunky ones.
What it costs you
The match between sauce and surface, which is the whole reason shapes exist. A thin oily sauce slides off penne and pools at the bottom.

Instead · 2

rice noodles

by weight, soaked instead of boiled

What it gets you
A starch to carry sauce, ready faster and gluten free.
What it costs you
Any ability to hold an emulsion. Rice noodles do not release starch into the water, so a carbonara or a cacio e pepe has nothing to build on.

Instead · 3

gnocchi or another dumpling

a pound of gnocchi per twelve ounces of dry pasta

What it gets you
A fast, filling base that sits well under the same sauces and browns in a pan if you want it to.
What it costs you
Lightness. Gnocchi is heavier than it looks and portions that seem small are not.

Where you can just leave it out · 5

These dishes list pasta as optional. They were written to work without it, so no ratio is needed and nothing has to be bought.

Where the swap will be tasted · 26

These need it and are short enough that nothing hides: 4 required ingredients or fewer, which makes pasta a quarter of what is in the pan. Make the swap a decision rather than a repair.

Check what else is in the pan

The company pasta keeps in this library, counted off required ingredients. A swap that argues with the top two is the wrong swap, whatever a chart says.

What to make with pastaRank what I can actually cookAll substitutions