Kitchen Answers exists because most cooking questions get answered badly.
You search for what to use instead of eggs, and you get a listicle that says “try applesauce!” with no amount, no mention of what you’re baking, and no warning that it won’t work in the thing you’re actually making. Or you get a recipe blog where the answer is buried under nine paragraphs about someone’s grandmother.
This site is built for the opposite situation: you’re standing in the kitchen, something has gone wrong or something is missing, and you need a real answer quickly.
What we cover
- Ingredient substitutions — what to use when you’ve run out, with actual amounts
- Dietary substitutions — dairy-free, egg-free, vegan, gluten-free and vegetarian swaps
- Kitchen conversions — measurements, oven temperatures, and recipe scaling
- Food storage — how long things keep, and whether that’s a safety limit or a quality one
- Cooking answers — safe temperatures, and why your cookies spread
- Kitchen tools — interactive calculators that give you a personalised answer
We’re not a recipe blog. Recipes appear only where they genuinely help solve a problem.
Who writes this
Victor writes and builds Kitchen Answers. It’s an independent site — not a publishing group, not a content network. Lizette Paulo helps too. She’s an experienced home cook — not a professional chef, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise — and where she has time, she reviews and tests the substitutions and advice on this site: how something browns, how it holds up in the fridge, whether it actually works the way a recipe says it will. When something’s been tested here, we’ll say so. When it hasn’t, we won’t pretend it has.
How we research and check things
This is the part that matters most, so here it is plainly.
Every ratio and factual claim is checked against a named source
Substitution ratios, storage times and cooking temperatures are traced back to a source we’re willing to name — King Arthur Baking, America’s Test Kitchen, US university extension services, the USDA and FDA, and the UK Food Standards Agency, among others. Those sources are listed at the bottom of every guide so you can check them yourself.
Nothing gets invented to fill a gap
If a source gives only qualitative guidance, we report it qualitatively rather than making up a number that looks more authoritative. Where we couldn’t verify something, we say so on the page instead of quietly leaving it out or stating it anyway.
You’ll find several examples of this across the site — a widely repeated piece of advice about scaling salt that we couldn’t trace to any authority, commonly cited causes of a sunken cake that don’t come from a named source, and a US figure for how long opened milk keeps that doesn’t appear to exist in federal guidance.
We say when official guidance disagrees
Readers here are in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and food safety authorities genuinely differ on some points. UK advice on cooked rice is far stricter than US advice. The UK Food Standards Agency has reversed its position on refrigerating potatoes. UK and US guidance on pink pork isn’t the same.
Where that happens, we show both rather than picking one and pretending it’s universal.
If your country isn’t listed
Our food storage and safety guides check official guidance from Canada, the United States, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, because those are the authorities we’ve directly verified. If you’re reading from somewhere else, that’s simply because we haven’t gotten to your country’s guidance yet, not because it was left out on purpose. Your own national or local food safety authority is the best source to check, and if the storage windows on this site are roughly similar to what they publish, that’s a reasonable sign you’re in the right range.
We say when not to substitute
Some recipes depend on an ingredient completely, and replacing it produces a failure rather than a variation. Meringues, custards and egg-structured cakes are the usual examples. In those cases the honest answer is “use a different recipe,” and we’d rather say that than force an answer that wastes your ingredients.
What this site isn’t
It isn’t medical, dietary or nutritional advice. If you’re managing coeliac disease, a diagnosed food allergy or any other clinical condition, your doctor or dietitian’s guidance takes precedence over anything written here.
Food safety guidance also can’t account for your particular kitchen. We can tell you what the published limits are; we can’t tell you how long your groceries sat in a warm car. When something is borderline, throw it out.
Corrections
If you find something wrong here, please tell us. Getting a substitution ratio wrong wastes someone’s ingredients, and getting a storage time wrong is worse than that. Corrections are welcome and get acted on — you can reach us through the contact page.
How the site is funded
Kitchen Answers is free to read. In future it may carry advertising, and some links may be affiliate links that earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That will never change what we recommend — see the affiliate disclosure for the details.