When Super Grub, the photo feature in Grublin, is shown a finished, cooked dish rather than raw ingredients, it writes a one-line description detailed enough to recreate the plate, including the main components and sides, and hands that to Grub as the brief for a recipe. The recipe is written for your kitchen and obeys the allergens, diet and dislikes you set once. Grublin is a free recipe app for iPhone and Android; scanning is free and photos are not stored.
The fakeaway, without the recipe hunt
"Fakeaway" is a whole genre now: the takeaway you love, made at home for a fraction of the price and usually better for you. The catch is the same as every other recipe search. You know what you want. You don't know what it's called, or you do and the first ten results are someone's life story, or the version you find uses the one ingredient you can't eat.
Super Grub skips all of it. Photograph the dish. He describes what he sees, you confirm it, and the recipe comes back written for you.
What to photograph
- The takeaway on the table, before it's gone. Next Friday you cook it instead.
- A restaurant plate. Yours, or the one at the next table if you're brave.
- A menu photo, or the picture on a takeaway app.
- A dish on social media you've saved and never made.
- The holiday meal you still think about.
- Last night's leftovers, to make the dish fresh from scratch.
Good light and the whole plate in frame help. If Super Grub isn't confident what he's looking at, he shows you his description first so you can correct it before anything is cooked.
How the recipe becomes yours
This is where photographing a dish beats searching for one. The recipe Grub writes is not a copy of the takeaway's. It is the dish, rebuilt for your rules and your kitchen.
- Gluten-free: the battered thing comes back in a cornflour batter and the sauce uses tamari.
- Dairy-free: the creamy curry is finished with coconut cream.
- Vegan or vegetarian: the meat dish comes back with tofu, jackfruit, mushrooms or pulses doing the work.
- Halal: the pork is swapped and the wine is stock.
- Nut-free: the satay becomes a seed-based sauce; the pad thai loses its peanuts.
- Your kit: an air fryer does the crispy part; no oven means a hob version.
- Your spice level and servings are applied like any other recipe.
Then Tweak it ("less sweet", "more sauce") or ask for a different idea if the photo sent Grub somewhere you didn't mean.
What it isn't
Grublin writes an original recipe for a dish like the one in the photo. It does not reproduce any restaurant's recipe, and it works on what it can see on the plate, not on who made it. A photo of a sign or a logo gives Super Grub much less to go on than a photo of the food; sometimes he'll still get there from what he knows, but photograph the dish for a reliable result.
Yes. Photograph the dish and Super Grub describes it, then Grub writes a recipe to make it at home, without the ingredients you avoid and using the kit you own. No. A menu photo, a screenshot or a saved picture from your camera roll works. Super Grub reads the dish, not where the picture came from. It will be a recipe for that kind of dish, written for your kitchen and your rules. If you've set dairy-free, the creamy version comes back dairy-free, which is the point. It reads the food on the plate. A logo on its own gives it little to work with; photograph the dish itself for a reliable result. No. It is sent securely, read once to produce the description, and not kept. Scanning is free and doesn't use a free recipe.Questions people ask
Can Grublin make a homemade version of a takeaway from a photo?
Does it need to be my own photo?
Will the recipe match the takeaway exactly?
Does it recognise restaurant brands or logos?
Does the photo get stored?