top culinary queries of Ukrainians and useful Google tools to help in the kitchen

The pan­dem­ic has made adjust­ments to var­i­ous areas of our dai­ly lives. Many have switched to a remote mode of work or train­ing and began to spend more time at home — accord­ing­ly, more time to devote to cook­ing. This is also shown by Google Search sta­tis­tics in Ukraine — for exam­ple, over the past 12 months, the num­ber of search queries by Ukrain­ian Google users with the word “recipe” increased by 29% com­pared to the same peri­od a year ear­li­er.

What recipes were most often searched by Ukrain­ian users on Google over the past year? The most pop­u­lar recipe over the past 12 months has been the recipe for syrni­ki. Also among the pop­u­lar dish­es: pan­cakes, solyan­ka and char­lotte.

1. Syrni­ki
2. Pan­cakes
3. Solyan­ka
4. Char­lotte
5. lasagna
6. Fur coat
7. Piz­za
8. East­er cake
9. Pilaf
10. Pan­cakes

In addi­tion, in the “Sal­ads” cat­e­go­ry, the recipe for “Cae­sar” sal­ad turned out to be the most pop­u­lar among Ukrain­ian Google users. Grat­ed pie became the leader among pie recipes, and “Napoleon” became the leader among cakes. Ukraini­ans were also active­ly look­ing for recipes for milk­shakes and Mar­gar­i­tas.

Useful tools

If you need to find a new recipe, then Google Search will always come to the res­cue. We offer a few more tips on how to use Google tools to make your time in the kitchen more pro­duc­tive and inter­est­ing.

• Use the search mode on YouTube — and you will receive a selec­tion of videos with visu­al step-by-step rec­om­men­da­tions for prepar­ing cer­tain dish­es. In addi­tion, when you search on Google, in addi­tion to web­sites, you will be able to see links to YouTube videos in the results.
• Often inter­est­ing recipes can be found on sites in unfa­mil­iar lan­guages. Even with­out know­ing the for­eign lan­guage in which the recipe is writ­ten, you can eas­i­ly under­stand the mean­ing — Google Chrome has a built-in Trans­la­tor that will quick­ly trans­late the entire text of the site into an under­stand­able lan­guage right on the site page.
• With the help of Google Search, you can imme­di­ate­ly get quick answers — brief infor­ma­tion with the answer to the query below the search line with­out hav­ing to go to sites: cal­cu­la­tor, unit con­vert­er, num­ber of calo­ries. You can even use your voice to set a timer for a spe­cif­ic time.
• Often in for­eign recipes, the vol­ume or weight is indi­cat­ed in ounces or oth­er units, and Google will eas­i­ly help you con­vert one mea­sure of weight or vol­ume to anoth­er. In this case, the answer will be shown imme­di­ate­ly after the search string. Enter, for exam­ple, “1 ounce in ml” — and get the answer “1 US ounce = 29.5735296 ml”.
• You were going to cook, say, quiche with spinach and ricot­ta, but you didn’t have ricot­ta on hand. Use Google Maps to find near­by stores where you can buy this prod­uct. To do this, in the search on Maps, enter or say in your voice “buy ricot­ta near­by”, and you will see on the map the near­est stores where you can buy this prod­uct. This can be espe­cial­ly use­ful if you are in an unfa­mil­iar area.
• If you come across an unfa­mil­iar prod­uct, the Google Lens app can help iden­ti­fy it. Point your cam­era at an object and the app will tell you what’s in front of you (it’ll even tell pars­ley from cilantro). In addi­tion, Google Lens can trans­late texts in real time, find infor­ma­tion about places and objects around you.
• For more fun cook­ing in the kitchen, turn on the Music for cook­ing playlist or radio sta­tion on YouTube Music. Alter­na­tive­ly, find your favorite song and select “Turn on radio sta­tion” from the drop-down menu, YouTube Music will auto­mat­i­cal­ly select sim­i­lar songs for you.
• To keep all the inter­est­ing recipes in one place, use the “Selec­tions” fea­ture in the Google app on your smart­phone. The func­tion allows you to cre­ate the­mat­ic col­lec­tions of links, pho­tos or videos and get quick access to the infor­ma­tion you need. You can also access your col­lec­tions on your com­put­er by vis­it­ing google.com/collections
• Google Keep is a handy note-tak­ing app. Write down ideas and plans, make shop­ping lists and get time­ly reminders. You can take a pho­to of a recipe or doc­u­ment so you can quick­ly find the pho­to in Google Keep lat­er.