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How to make the most of ckbk's search feature

Matthew Cockerill avatar
Written by Matthew Cockerill
Updated over a week ago

With such a huge collection of recipes in ckbk's collection, powerful search tools are a must. The filters at the top of the search results page are one way to narrow down your search.  Here are a few additional features that will help:

Smart handling of American vs British English
Zucchini or courgette? Cilantro or Coriander? Egg plant or Aubergine?
Don't worry - ckbk has you covered. We automatically handle these alternative usages, and many, many more.

Variant spellings
Kebab or kebob or kabob? Panir or Paneer?
Again, don't worry - all handled seamlessly.

Search for a specific phrase
Just use quotes e.g. "sichuan pepper" "almond flour" or "puff pastry"

Exclude an ingredient
As on Google, you can prefix any ingredient (or other search term) with a hyphen in order to exclude results matching that term
e.g. cookie -chocolate -nuts or eggplant -cheese

Filter to show only recipes which use your preferred measurement units
e.g. eggplant recipes cups, eggplant recipes metric, eggplant recipes imperial

Re-order your results

Search results are ordered by default according to "relevance", which takes into account a range of factors including recency, popularity, whether the recipe has a photo, and how many expert recommendations the book has received.


But you can also reorder the results to see the most popular recipes, or the most recently published recipes, or the recipes most recently added to ckbk.

Finally, "Book order" is a new option - it lets you see all the recipes in the order in which they appear in the book. And if your search is across multiple books, this also groups the results by book which can be helpful.

Looking for a specific national cuisine?
You can use the dropdown search filters to restrict to a specific country, but for an even simpler way to filter just add the country name to your search:

Broader and narrower regional searches are also possible - e.g.

Seasonal searches

Broad searches
ckbk understands food categories, so searches do the right thing

Here's a full list of the 'categories' which ckbk's smart search currently understands (let us know what we're missing)

  • Fruit

  • Vegetable

  • Meat

  • Poultry

  • Offal

  • Game

  • Seafood

  • Fish

  • Shellfish

  • Herb

  • Spice

  • Cheese

  • Mushroom

  • Pasta

  • Citrus

  • Nut

  • Soup          

Find recipes with photos

Prefer to cook visually? Many of the great classic cookbooks don't contain many photos, but add 'photo' to your search and we'll focus your results on the recipes which do:

Find recipes with videos
Did you know that some of ckbk's recipes include licensed video clips from the associated TV show? 

Something to drink with that?
Don't forget ckbk includes wine reference books too, so you can find the meaning of terms or look up a particular grape, region or producer.


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