What are pantry staples?

Updated 2026-09-11

Pantry staples are the ingredients your household always keeps in the kitchen — salt, olive oil, flour, pepper, and so on. Marking something as a staple tells ReciLore "assume we have this".

It's a simple on/off list

The pantry is not a quantity tracker or a "what's in my fridge right now" list. An ingredient is either on the staples list or it isn't. There's no "I'm running low" or "I'm out" state, and no counts.

Where to find it

Open the Grocery tab and tap the pantry button in the toolbar — it opens a dedicated Pantry staples screen where you can search for ingredients and add or remove staples. You can also get there from the "Check your pantry" section on Grocery via its Manage link.

Close variants are covered automatically

Flagging Olive Oil as a staple also covers "Extra Virgin Olive Oil" and "Virgin Olive Oil" — ReciLore treats a small set of true equivalents (like salt varieties, cooking oils, and vinegar types) as the same staple, so you don't have to flag every variant separately. See How ReciLore matches ingredients.

Why it's useful

When you build a grocery list from a recipe, ingredients that are staples don't clutter your "to buy" list — they move to a separate Check your pantry section instead, as a reminder to make sure you actually have them. See Check your pantry.