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Everything you can do in Indian cooking: find a dish, read and resize its recipe, change it to suit what you have, cook it step by step, weigh its spices on the Half Decent Scale, and keep track of your kitchen.
Find a dish
Type a dish, an ingredient or a region in the search box on the first page, or at the top of every page. You can search in English or by the Indian name: haldi finds turmeric.
By main ingredient
On the first page, pick a main ingredient (Mutton, Lentils, Potato, Chicken...) to see its dishes, most popular first. Then pick something it's paired with to see only the dishes that have both: lentils with spinach, mutton with peas. The type buttons narrow it to one course: breads, rice, pulses, sweets and so on.
A recipe
Every ingredient is weighed in grams, with the book's own measure underneath. A dish's flavour comes from its spice mixes (masalas), so each is listed on its own, spice by spice, with when it goes in. Spoons are a rough measure: a level teaspoon of ground cumin weighs 2.6 g, but a heaped one weighs a lot more. Weighed, it comes out the same every time.
Beside the recipe: how many it feeds and how big a portion is, the calories with fat, carbs and protein, how hot it is, and how fragrant.
Cooking for more or fewer
Tap any number in the facts panel and type a new one: how many it feeds, the portion, or the calories. Every amount in the recipe follows, method included.
Change the diet
Every dish says whether it is Meat, Fish, Dairy (vegetarian) or Vegan. Tap a lighter diet to see the swaps that get it there: for Murgh Makhni, white fish for the chicken, or paneer, potato or cauliflower to make it vegetarian.
Don't have something?
Every ingredient has substitutes. Open Don't have something? under the recipe, pick the ingredient you're missing, and tap Use on a substitute: the ingredient list, the nutrition and even the method's wording change. Here, plain yogurt becomes coconut milk, and step 2 now says to whisk 240 g of coconut milk. Undo takes it back.
Similar dishes
Under each recipe are its closest cousins, each with what's the same, what's different and how it tastes by comparison.
Make this: the cooking view
When you're ready to cook, tap Make this beside the method. Everything but the ingredients and the method goes away. Tap the arrow on a step to move to it: the ingredients it uses are outlined, and the rest fade. On a phone, the ingredients and the method scroll separately, so the step and what it needs are on screen together. Done at the end marks the dish as made.
Make it on the Half Decent Scale
Every spice mix has a Make on scale button. Connect a Half Decent Scale (Chrome on a computer or Android phone; on an iPhone or iPad, install the free Beacio app first) and put a small bowl on it. Each ingredient zeroes the scale and shows how much to add, going green when you hit the target.
Ingredients
Every ingredient has its own page: its Indian name, how much a teaspoon, a tablespoon or a piece of it weighs, its nutrition, its substitutes, and every dish that uses it.
Spice mixtures
The spice mixtures and pastes other recipes use, such as garam masala and ginger-garlic paste, have their own recipes. Make a batch on the scale and keep it for later.
My Kitchen
Log in with your free decentespresso.com account and tell My Kitchen which spices and staples you have. You can keep a kitchen for each place, such as Home and Office.
You can make lists the dishes you can cook now, with what to buy fresh. One away lists the dishes that need just one more thing. What to get next names the spices that would unlock the most new dishes.
Liked and Made
Tap Like on a dish to keep it for later, and Made once you've cooked it (Done in the cooking view does that too). A heart and a check show on its picture everywhere, and My Kitchen lists both. In My Kitchen's settings you can share your lists, and see what friends who share theirs have liked and made.
AI assistants
AI assistants can use Decent Cookbooks too: it has an API, an MCP server, and a guide for them at llms.txt. Connect one to your account and it can read and change My Kitchen and your lists (but nothing else in your account).