Forum

When I go to my Library to search Recipes, the search field opens with:-

Search by ingredient, author, book or recipe title

Usually, this isn't a problem, as I am searching by ingredient anyway so enter a word or term such as mushroom or shiitake and get a list of recipes including that ingredient.

If I want to search by author, not many recipes include Rick Stein or Julia Child as an ingredient, although a few recipes do have a cook's name in the title, such ac as "Elizabeth David's Country Pate" but few enough to ignore.

Book titles are also not too much of a problem, though you often have to use several words to be sure of getting a book and not an ingredient list, "The Little Garlic Book" rather than just garlic for example which could be awkward if you don't exactly remember the title, and that's why you are searching.

But today I wanted a recipe for the spice mix garam masala, and couldn't find a way of searching only recipe titles, which was a problem. Entering garam masala as a search term returned literally hundreds of recipes using it as an ingredient; sorting by recipe title enabled me to find 5 recipes for making my own, all entitle Garam Masala. Which is all well and good but I’m sure I’ve missed a few with names like “Our Special Garam Masala”. This is obviously a general problem with recipes that make components of other recipes, curry powder, dukkah, za’atar and not just spice mixtures, those are simply what are on my mind.

Is there any way of searching for only recipes title and not all recipes that have the term somewhere in the text, and if not, could there be?

You can filter your results to get exactly what you want: for recipes for the spice mix garam masala,by hitting the + sign next to recipe type under Filter BY (?) it will open up the menu for different types of recipes, by selecting Misc., you will open up the menu for that, there you will find Spice/herb blends & rubs, selecting that will get you what you want.

By putting the author's name in quotes will get you all recipes by that author on your bookshelf.

To search for recipes within a certain book: just open the book on your shelf and use the function "search this book for recipes".

Thank you, I know how to search, but I hadn't found the filters as they don't show on my screen, being off to the bottom right below "Only Show", which I don't really use as I'm generally searching my bookshelf

In this case filtering for herb and spice blend does increase the number of recipes from 6 to 13, including for example, Kashmiri Garam Masala

But not all searches will have an approporiate filter, and it's a bit of a faff working out which to apply, and assumes the categories are correct, two of my results were for actual curries, I still think being able to search or filter by Recipe Title/Name would be an advantage.

StokeySue - as chawkins says, the way to get an exact match to a recipe type is to use filters. Most recipes with which you would have this issue (wanting a recipe for an ingredient rather than a recipe containing that ingredient) will have a filter category. If you are not familiar with using filters I suggest you go through Tutorial #3, accessed from the green Need Help? button at bottom right (not available on phones). Or take a look at this Help section.
Although you saw a couple of curry recipes in your "garam masala" search after you applied the Spice / herb blends & rubs filter that will be because those curry recipes include the spice mix recipe. We add category tags for all the parts of the recipe e.g. if there is sauce recipe as part of the dish we will also add a Sauce tag.

Thank you, I am quite capable of using filters when I can see they are there, I notice it's a bit more obvious on iPad than it was on my pc where they are not visible at all without scrolling down a full screen with the settings I have

But there are a lot of levels in those filters, as I said they are quite a faff, and I still think there would be uses for being able to search or filter on recipe title