Meal Recipe Finder
Pricing
from $10.00 / 1,000 results
Meal Recipe Finder
What Does Meal Recipe Finder Do?
Meal Recipe Finder is an Apify actor that searches TheMealDB database for meal recipes from around the world. It returns comprehensive recipe data including meal names, cooking categories, cuisine origins, step-by-step instructions, complete ingredient lists with measurements, images, YouTube tutorial links, and source URLs. Ideal for food bloggers, recipe aggregation platforms, meal planning applications, and culinary data analysis.
Why Use Meal Recipe Finder?
Collecting recipe data manually is time-consuming and error-prone. This actor automates the process by querying TheMealDB, a well-maintained database of meals from various cuisines worldwide. The structured output separates ingredients from measurements, making it trivial to generate shopping lists or calculate nutritional information. No API key is needed, and results come in clean JSON ready for any application.
How to Use Meal Recipe Finder
- Enter a meal name to search (e.g., "chicken", "pasta", "curry").
- Set the maximum number of results you want.
- Click "Start" to fetch matching meal recipes.
- Download your results in JSON, CSV, or Excel from the dataset tab.
Works out of the box with zero configuration — starts searching for chicken recipes by default.
Input Parameters
| Parameter | Type | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| query | string | Name of meal to search for | chicken |
| maxResults | integer | Maximum number of meals to return | 25 |
Output Data
Each meal result includes:
- name — Meal name
- category — Category (Beef, Chicken, Dessert, Pasta, etc.)
- area — Cuisine origin (American, British, Italian, Japanese, etc.)
- instructions — Full cooking instructions
- ingredients — List of all ingredients needed
- measures — Corresponding measurements for each ingredient
- imageUrl — URL to meal image
- youtubeUrl — Link to YouTube cooking tutorial
- source — Original recipe source URL
Cost of Usage
This actor runs efficiently on the Apify platform with minimal compute resources.
- Per result: $0.01
- Per 1,000 results: $10
- Actor start: $0.005
Most searches complete in under 10 seconds using only 256 MB of memory.
Tips and Best Practices
- Search by cuisine type keywords like "Italian" or "Japanese" to find regional dishes.
- The ingredients and measures arrays are parallel — use them together for accurate recipes.
- YouTube URLs provide visual cooking guides that complement the text instructions.
- Combine with the Cocktail Recipe Finder for complete meal and drink pairing data.
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