Cookbooks: A Quick Start for Your Recipe Library
Overview
Cookbooks are curated collections of expedition recipes, built and vetted by professionals in the outdoor industry. Instead of building your recipe box one recipe at a time, you can browse a cookbook and add recipes — individually or all at once — directly into My Recipes.
Cookbooks are especially useful when you're new to Wholesum, when you're moving your operation over from paper or spreadsheets, or any time you want proven trip-tested meals as a starting point. Everything you add becomes your recipe — you can rename it, adjust servings, swap ingredients, change units, and add tags exactly like a recipe you built yourself.
Where to Find Cookbooks
There are two ways to get to the cookbook library:
- From your homepage — click Cookbooks in the row of quick links near the bottom of the page (next to Settings, How can we help?, and Community Forum).
- From My Recipes — click the OPTIONS arrow on the CREATE NEW RECIPE button and choose BROWSE COOKBOOKS.
Either path takes you to wholesum.app/cook_books.
What's Inside
The library currently includes three collections:
- Backpacking Trips — lightweight, calorie-dense, shelf-stable meals for weekend overnights through long-distance treks.
- Canoe Voyages — practical meals built for multi-day paddling trips, from the Boundary Waters and Quetico to your local river.
- Whitewater Rafting — hearty riverside breakfasts, camp dinners, sides, and desserts for multi-day river trips, family floats, and guided expeditions.
Each collection contains roughly 85–100 recipes spanning breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, desserts, and beverages, with realistic portions and instructions written for a camp kitchen.
Browsing a Cookbook
Click Explore on any cookbook to open it. Inside you'll find:
- Category filter — narrow the list to Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, Dessert, or Beverage.
- Tag filter — filter by the cookbook's trip-type tag (for example, backpacking).
- Search Recipe — find a recipe by name.
Click any recipe name to open its full detail page, where you can review the ingredients and quantities, suggested substitutions, servings, dietary restriction flags, and the full preparation instructions before deciding to add it.
Three Ways to Add Recipes
1. Add the entire cookbook
Click ADD ALL RECIPES at the top of the cookbook page. Every recipe in that collection is copied into your library in one step. This is the fastest way to get up and running.
2. Add a selection of recipes
Use the checkboxes to the left of each recipe name to pick exactly what you want. A summary bar appears at the bottom of the screen showing how many recipes you've selected — click Add Selected (#) recipes to import them.
Hint: Combine this with the Category filter to pull in a whole meal period at once — for example, filter to Breakfast, check the ones you like, and add them as a group.
3. Add one recipe at a time
Open any recipe from within the cookbook and click Save Recipe on the recipe detail page.
Once added, your recipes appear in My Recipes, where you can edit them like any other recipe.
Important: Reconcile Your Ingredients After Adding
We strongly recommend visiting the Ingredients page after you add recipes from a cookbook.
Cookbook recipes bring their own ingredient names with them. If you already have recipes in your account from other sources — recipes you built manually, imported from a URL, generated with Olive, or pulled from shared recipes — you may end up with two entries for the same item (for example, Brown Sugar and Sugar, Brown, or Cheddar and Cheddar Cheese).
Duplicate ingredients don't break anything, but they do split your shopping list, your costing, and your packing quantities across two lines instead of combining them into one. Cleaning them up takes just a few minutes.
To reconcile duplicates:
- Go to Ingredients in the top navigation.
- Click Check next to Check for duplicate ingredients in the upper left.
- Wholesum scans your list and reports how many possible duplicates it found. Click Review.
- The Duplicate Ingredients window groups the likely matches together (for example, Sugar (3)). Click Review & Merge on any group.
- In the Merge Ingredients window, enter the New Ingredient Name you want to keep, choose the Unit, and optionally set the Store and Ingredient Notes.
- Review the Recipes list at the bottom — this shows every recipe that uses one of the duplicates, along with its quantity and unit. Adjust any quantity or unit that needs to be corrected as part of the merge.
- Save the merge. The duplicates are combined into a single ingredient across all of your recipes.
Repeat for each group. You only need to do this once after a bulk import — not every time you plan a trip.
Tips
- Start with one cookbook. Adding all three at once gives you nearly 280 recipes to sort through. Most users are better served adding the collection that matches their primary trip type first.
- Reconcile before you build a meal plan. Merging ingredients first means your shopping lists and quantities are accurate from your very first menu.
- Review costs and stores. Cookbook recipes arrive without your pricing or store assignments. After merging, use the Ingredients page to add the store, cost, and department details you rely on.
- Use tags. Cookbook recipes come tagged by trip type, so you can filter My Recipes down to just backpacking or rafting meals when you're planning.
- Edit freely. These recipes are professionally built starting points, not fixed templates. Adjust servings, ingredients, and instructions to match how your operation actually cooks.
