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BBC Good Food MCP server: let your AI agent search recipes

Wield is an MCP server that gives your AI agent one BBC Good Food tool, bbcgoodfood.com/search-recipes. The tool searches BBC Good Food for a dish or ingredients and returns recipes with the star rating, number of ratings, total time, skill level, vegetarian and vegan flags and a link. The search runs in your own browser, and it needs no BBC Good Food login.

Updated

Live recipebbcgoodfood.com/search-recipesv2

BBC Good Food Find recipes on BBC Good Food

Read-only, no loginRuns in your browser only

Parameters (3)
pageinteger
querystringrequiredDish or ingredients, e.g. 'lasagne', 'chicken curry', 'banana bread'
sortstring "relevance" | "newest" | "popular" | "quickest"
Use it with your agent

What your agent gets

RecipeWhat it doesLoginStatus (7 Nov 2026)
bbcgoodfood.com/search-recipesFinds recipes for a dish or ingredients, with ratings, times, skill level and linksNoOK, 5 of 5 checks, 1 request

The tool takes one required input, query, for example lasagne, chicken curry or banana bread. The optional inputs are sort and page. sort takes relevance (the default), newest, popular or quickest. page starts at 1. Each page holds 30 recipes. The result gives total, the number of matches, when the site reports one.

Each recipe has a title, rating, ratings (the number of ratings), total_time as the site shows it, total_minutes, skill, vegetarian, vegan, premium, image and url. total_minutes reads the common formats, such as 30 mins, 2 hrs and 1 hr 35 mins. If the site uses another format, total_minutes stays empty and total_time still shows the text.

Premium recipes are part of the results. They belong to the Good Food app subscription and link to pages under /premium/. The premium field marks them, so filter on it before you send a link to someone.

How a request flows

  1. You ask your agent: "Find lasagne recipes on BBC Good Food, most popular first, with the total time and skill level."
  2. The agent calls find_recipe, then run with bbcgoodfood.com/search-recipes, query set to lasagne and sort set to popular.
  3. wield-mcp passes the run through the local bridge to the Wield extension.
  4. The extension sends the request from a BBC Good Food tab in your browser, so the search runs in your own browser.
  5. The recipes go back to your agent. Nothing passes through wield.run.

In our check on 7 November 2026, a lasagne search sorted by most popular passed all 5 checks in one request and 0.2 s. It returned 30 of 90 recipes. A nonsense query still returns a few loosely related recipes, because the search is fuzzy.

What leaves your computer

A search makes one request to www.bbcgoodfood.com, for one results page. The recipe does not open recipe pages, and it does not load the recipe images it lists. Wield logs the request on your computer only, with method, host, path, status and timing. It never logs bodies or query values. Telemetry is off by default. Wield never reads, copies or sends your cookies or passwords.

BBC Good Food's terms, in plain words

BBC Good Food sends an AI signal with its pages. Content-Signal says that search is allowed (search=yes) and that AI training is not (ai-train=no). The site's robots.txt disallows /search* for bots. The recipe calls the site's search API, /api/search-frontend/search, which that robots.txt rule does not cover. The recipe uses the search for your own query, and nothing from it is used for training. Each call makes one request, and the recipe fetches no recipe pages.

The scope is simple. Wield runs this recipe when you ask for it, for one search per call, from your own browser. It does not run bulk jobs, and it does not buy anything.

Our review of these terms is not finished, and this is not legal advice. Read BBC Good Food's terms and its robots.txt yourself before you use the recipe in any other way.

Limits and what is not working yet

  • Read only. The recipe finds recipes. It does not save or rate them, and it does not log in.
  • Fuzzy search. A query with no real match can still return loose matches. Check the title before you use one.
  • Premium recipes are included. Check the premium field.
  • Times can be empty. total_minutes reads only the common formats.
  • Run limits apply. A run has at most 12 steps, 40 requests, 5 MB per response and 60 seconds.
  • No benchmark yet. We have not benchmarked this recipe against a browser agent.

FAQ

Can the agent save or rate a recipe?

No. The recipe only searches. It does not log in or change anything on the site.

Does the search need a BBC Good Food account?

No. Search works without an account.

Are premium recipes in the results?

Yes. They are marked in the premium field and link to pages under /premium/. Filter on that field if you want only the recipes that are not premium.

Which AI apps work with it?

Any MCP client. npx -y wield-mcp init sets up Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. Other MCP clients work with the standard stdio config.

Where do the results go?

To your agent, on your own computer. The results never pass through wield.run.