Frequently Asked Questions

Fakeout Kitchen is a recipe site built around one idea: the meals you love from restaurants and takeout menus can be made at home with cleaner ingredients. Every recipe surfaces the swaps that matter most — the seed oils that can be replaced, the refined sugars that don't need to be there, the seasoning blends hiding additives when ground spices do the same job better.

A clean swap is a direct substitution for a common ingredient that improves what you're eating without changing the dish. Avocado oil instead of vegetable oil. Coconut aminos instead of soy sauce with additives. Organic cane sugar instead of HFCS. The recipe still tastes like what you're craving — it's just made from things you'd actually want to eat.

No. You can browse every recipe, save pantry items, search, and sign up for the newsletter without creating an account. Voting on recipes, saving recipes to your book, and the "Made it" photo wall require a free account. An account also unlocks cross-device pantry sync and allergen preferences — but your pantry works locally on any device without one.

Yes — when you're signed in, visit your account page to choose from the Big 9 allergens: dairy, gluten, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, fish, soy, and sesame. Once saved, any clean swap card on a recipe page that contains an ingredient matching your selections will show a warning badge. Open that swap to see which allergen it conflicts with and get a clean alternative suggestion specific to that allergen.

Yes — use the Submit a Recipe form. Every submission goes through a short moderation review before it's published. We read each one to make sure it's accurate, complete, and genuinely useful. Nothing is auto-published.

The Pantry is a curated list of shelf-stable ingredients organized by aisle — the building blocks that appear across dozens of our recipes. Each item includes a note on why it's worth keeping on hand and, where available, a link to a clean version you can order.

Tap any ingredient card on the Pantry page. A panel slides up showing the item and a button — tap anywhere on the panel (or the button directly) to toggle it in and out of your saved list. A floating View My Pantry button appears at the bottom of the screen once you've saved at least one item.

Your pantry is saved in your browser's local storage, so it persists across sessions on the same device even without an account. It survives closing and reopening the browser, but it's tied to that specific browser on that specific device.

If you want your pantry to follow you across devices — phone, tablet, laptop — sign in with a free account. The moment you sign in, any items you've already saved locally are merged with your account and synced to our server. From then on, every change you make is saved in both places automatically.

Your server-saved pantry loads automatically. If you've also saved items locally on that new device before signing in, both lists are merged — nothing is lost from either side.

Yes. When you have items saved, a My Pantry bar appears at the top of the Pantry page with a Clear all button. You can also tap any saved item to deselect it individually.

Yes. When a recipe or pantry item identifies a cleaner version of an ingredient, we link to an Amazon search for that product. If you buy something through one of those links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We're an Amazon Associate. Every recommendation reflects what we actually think is worth buying — not what pays a higher rate.

Outbound clicks are logged anonymously to help us understand which ingredients people actually look up — we use this to prioritize adding more swap notes. No personal data is attached to click logs.