Our Story
Cooking from home, in a kitchen far from it
DishDrift started in a small kitchen in Germany. I'd moved abroad to study, and soon after arriving I just wanted to cook a dish from home, following a recipe I knew well. The recipe was simple, but the ingredients often weren't where you'd expect: some weren't sold nearby at all, and some were right there on the shelf under a local name and packaging I couldn't recognize, so everything needed looking up. I still remember my first trip to the local supermarket. It took me two hours to walk back out.
The recipe apps I used were no help. They assume you live where the recipe was written, and not one of them could tell me what to use instead when the real thing wasn't there. So I asked around: other students, local WhatsApp groups. The answers were out there, but they surfaced and disappeared just as fast, scattered all over the place.
That's the gap DishDrift fills. It's a community cookbook for people cooking far from home, and the most valuable thing here is the line someone from your home country, already living where you live now, leaves under a recipe from their own experience: "can't find this in Germany? use this instead." Every swap, every photo, every adaptation someone shares means the next person doesn't start from zero.
We're still early, and we're building this one direction at a time, starting with the people we know best. If you're cooking the food of home somewhere its ingredients aren't sold, this is for you.
— Chi
Press
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Open the press kit →Frequently asked questions
DishDrift is a community cookbook for expats and travelers. You set where home is and where you live now, and you see recipes from people with the same background, along with notes on which local ingredients to use when the original ones aren't available.
A Local Swap is a note on an ingredient telling you what to use instead when you can't find the original where you live: for example, which German product works in place of a Taiwanese sauce. It's the heart of DishDrift: knowledge that usually disappears in chat groups, kept in one searchable place.
Adapt lets you take any published recipe and make your own version of it: swapping ingredients and adjusting steps for where you live, while keeping a link back to the original author. It builds a visible chain of how a dish travels and changes from place to place.
When you cook a recipe, you can mark it as made and optionally add a photo and a note. The author gets notified, and other cooks see real proof that the recipe works. It's the easiest way to support someone whose recipe helped you.
Yes. DishDrift is completely free — there is nothing to buy or unlock. If we ever introduce premium features in the future, the core (browsing, posting recipes, and sharing swaps) will stay free.
Anyone who cooks and wants to share or discover recipes is welcome. You need to be at least 16 years old. Our early users get a permanent Early Adopter badge as a thank-you for helping the community start.
You can set any home and current location, and recipes can be written in any language, many in the cook's native language. The app interface is currently in English. We're focusing first on specific communities of people living abroad before expanding more widely.
We only collect what's needed to run the app, and we never sell your data or use your recipes to train AI. Full details are in our Privacy Policy, linked at the bottom of this page.
Every recipe and every "made" photo has a report option, and you can email us anytime at [email protected]. We review reports personally and remove anything that breaks our rules.
Yes, anytime. Go to your Profile, open the Account section, and choose Delete account. This permanently removes your recipes, photos, and personal data.