TheMealDB API — Free Recipe Data with Ingredients and Instructions

Building a food app? TheMealDB provides free recipe data with no API key.

Search Recipes

https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/search.php?s=pasta

Returns: name, category, cuisine, instructions, thumbnail, YouTube link, tags.

Browse by Category

https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/filter.php?c=Seafood

Browse by Cuisine

https://www.themealdb.com/api/json/v1/1/filter.php?a=Japanese

Ingredients

Each recipe has up to 20 ingredients with measures. Parse with a loop:

for (let i = 1; i <= 20; i++) {
  const ing = meal[`strIngredient${i}`];
  if (ing?.trim()) ingredients.push(ing);
}

Use Cases

• Meal planning apps
• Recipe recommendation engines
• Cooking blogs with auto-content
• Nutrition analysis tools

I built a Recipe Scraper on Apify — search knotless_cadence recipe.