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Pantry Hand

Cooking around the world from one ordinary pantry

Twenty everyday ingredients, one dinner from each region that needs the fewest extra things to buy.

Chicken kabsa, photographed from above
Chicken kabsa, Gulf & Yemeni. AI-generated illustration.

A common reason people don't cook food from other places is the shopping list: a dish looks great until it asks for six things you'd have to hunt for. So we picked twenty ingredients most kitchens already have and asked the site, region by region, which dinner needs the fewest extra things to buy.

The pantry: onion, garlic, egg, rice, flour, tomato, potato, chicken, butter, milk, lemon, carrot, soy sauce, ginger, scallion, cilantro, sugar, canned tomato, chickpea, pasta. Salt, pepper, oil and water are assumed.

These are picked by the same matching the home page uses, so they change as the site grows. Every recipe page lists exactly what you'd still need, and you can scale it to however many you're feeding.

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