Recipes with no oven at all

The whole internet assumes you have an oven

Student kitchens, hospital accommodation, bedsits with two rings and a microwave, caravans, the holiday let with a hob and nothing else, the three weeks between the oven breaking and the engineer arriving. Millions of people cook without an oven and almost no recipe acknowledges it. "Microwave recipes" online means mug cakes and sad pasta.

Grublin treats no oven as a fact about your kitchen, like an allergy. The recipe cannot need it. What comes back is a real dinner that happens to be made on a hob, in a microwave, or in an air fryer, not a compromise with the word "hack" in it.

How Grublin handles a missing oven or hob

No oven, hob present. The request states a hard kitchen constraint: no oven, nothing that needs baking or roasting. Dinner is built on the hob: pan dishes, one-pot rice and pasta, stir-fries, curries, soups, frying-pan flatbreads, and desserts that set rather than bake.

No hob, oven present. Less common, but the same mechanism: nothing cooked in a pan over a burner. Tray bakes and oven dishes do the work.

Neither. Set both to none and add whatever you have: microwave, air fryer, slow cooker, pressure cooker, grill, wok on a portable burner. The request then says the cook can only cook with those appliances and the whole recipe must be made using just them plus no-cook prep. A microwave plus an air fryer is a surprisingly complete kitchen when the recipe is written for it.

Nothing at all. Set everything to none, add no extras, and Grub writes no-cook food: salads, wraps, assembled plates, overnight oats. He will be a bit put out about it.

No oven plus your dietary rules

The student and small-kitchen cook is as likely as anyone to have an allergy or a diet, and far less likely to find recipes that handle both. Set your allergens and diet once and every no-oven recipe fits them.

• Vegan with a microwave and a kettle: dhal, couscous-free grain bowls, noodle soups, beans on everything.
• Gluten-free on two rings: rice dishes, rice-noodle stir-fries with tamari, potato-based pan dinners.
• Dairy-free in a holiday let: one-pan curries and stews finished with coconut milk.

What you'll actually cook

Grub writes from what you have, so there is no fixed list, but no-oven cooking with a normal shelf tends to produce one-pot pasta and rice dishes, stir-fries, curries and dhals, chilli, frittatas finished under a grill or with a lid, pan-fried fish or chicken with a quick sauce, noodle soups, shakshuka, quesadillas, frying-pan pizzas, and microwave-steamed vegetables with something on top. Add an air fryer and the crispy things come back too.