Tandoor Recipes MCP
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives LLM agents full read/write access to a Tandoor Recipes instance — recipes, meal plans, ingredients, shopping lists, cook logs, nutrition, and AI-powered URL/image imports.
Turn "plan the week and make me a grocery list" into one prompt.
Why this server
- Full Tandoor API coverage — 100+ typed tools spanning recipes, meal plans, ingredients, steps, shopping lists, cook logs, recipe books, foods, units, keywords, supermarket categories, property types / nutrition, custom filters, unit conversions, automations, user files, user prefs, activity logs.
- Resources + Prompts, not just tools — read-only subscribable resources like
tandoor://meal-plan/this-week and tandoor://pantry/on-hand, plus ready-made prompts (plan_week, grocery_list_for_plan, what_can_i_make_tonight). Most Tandoor MCP forks ship tools only.
- Slim-by-default responses — a full recipe GET shrinks from ~20k characters to ~2k by stripping substitute trees, readonly timestamps, image URLs, etc. Pass
format: "full" anywhere for the raw Tandoor response.
- 3-stage URL import with a real fallback — tries Tandoor's native scraper first, then extracts schema.org JSON-LD from the page ourselves (works when Tandoor can't reach the URL or doesn't support the site), with an optional stub-on-failure escape hatch.
- AI import from images / PDFs — multipart upload to Tandoor's
ai-import/ endpoint, saves the parsed recipe.
- Validated inputs — every tool has a Zod input schema; invalid calls are rejected at the MCP boundary before reaching the handler.
- Transport-safe — retries with jittered backoff on 429 / 5xx, redacts your bearer token from error messages, reads response bodies exactly once (no "Body is unusable" footguns).
structuredContent + text — clients that support structured output skip a JSON re-parse round-trip; older clients still get text content.
Install
Compatibility: this server targets the Tandoor 2.x API. Tandoor 1.x instances are not supported — nested write payloads (recipes, meal plans, shopping entries) use 2.x serializer shapes. The server probes your instance's version at startup and warns on stderr and in the MCP instructions if it detects a pre-2.x Tandoor.
npm install -g @cliftonz/tandoor-recipes-mcp
Or npx without installing:
npx -y @cliftonz/tandoor-recipes-mcp
Configure
- In Tandoor: Settings → API Tokens → Create new token.
- Point your MCP client at the server.
Claude Code — one-shot plugin install
/plugin marketplace add Cliftonz/tandoor-recipe-mcp
/plugin install tandoor-recipes-mcp@cliftonz-tandoor
Claude Code prompts you for TANDOOR_URL and TANDOOR_TOKEN on install and stores the token securely. No mcpServers JSON editing needed.
Claude Desktop / Claude Code — manual config
{
"mcpServers": {
"tandoor": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@cliftonz/tandoor-recipes-mcp"],
"env": {
"TANDOOR_URL": "https://your-tandoor-instance.com",
"TANDOOR_TOKEN": "your-api-token",
"TANDOOR_MCP_PROFILE": "full"
}
}
}
}
Recommended Claude Code permissions
The repo ships a .claude/settings.json that auto-allows read tools and prompts for everything else. Copy these into your own project's .claude/settings.json to reduce permission friction:
{
"permissions": {
"allow": [
"mcp__tandoor__list_*",
"mcp__tandoor__get_*"
],
"ask": [
"mcp__tandoor__create_*",
"mcp__tandoor__update_*",
"mcp__tandoor__delete_*",
"mcp__tandoor__merge_*"
]
}
}
Environment variables
