A lot of people start keto by doing the same thing: they go looking for keto recipes. Keto bread, keto pizza, keto pasta, fathead dough, cloud buns, the lot. Then they spend a small fortune on almond flour, coconut flour, psyllium husk and sugar alcohols, fiddle about for an evening, and end up with a slightly sad imitation of the thing they were trying to replace. There is a much easier way, and it is the secret that makes keto sustainable rather than a chore: for almost everything savoury, you do not need a special recipe at all.

Most savoury food is already keto once you drop the starch

Look at what you actually cook on a normal week. A curry. A chilli. A stew or a casserole. A stir-fry. A roast. Grilled or roasted meat or fish with vegetables. Soup. A frittata. Almost all of it is built on protein, vegetables and flavour, with a starch bolted on the side or underneath: the rice, the pasta, the potatoes, the bread. None of these are “keto recipes”. They are just food, and they become low-carb the moment you cut down or leave off the starchy part. So rather than searching for “keto dinner ideas”, take the meals you already make and ask one question: what is the carb here, and can I drop it or shrink it? Nine times out of ten the answer is yes, and the rest of the meal carries on exactly as before.

So add more vegetables, and branch out from the usual ones

The starch was doing two jobs on your plate: filling you up, and soaking up the sauce. Vegetables do both jobs perfectly well, so when you remove the rice or potatoes, the move is simply to put more vegetables in their place. A bigger pile, a second vegetable, a tray of roasted veg alongside. This is where most people go wrong by under-doing it and then wondering why the meal feels thin.

The other trick is variety, because eating the same broccoli every night is what actually makes people quit. Branch out. Beyond the usual suspects there is cauliflower (roasted, mashed, or blitzed into rice), courgette, aubergine, fennel, celeriac, leeks, mushrooms of every kind, peppers, green beans, asparagus, cabbage and all its cousins, kohlrabi, spinach and chard, even roasted radishes, which turn mild and lovely. Each one behaves differently and takes seasoning differently, so the same protein feels like a new meal. Do keep a light touch on the higher-carb vegetables, the potatoes, parsnips, sweet potato, peas, sweetcorn and beetroot, but the long list of low-carb veg gives you more than enough to play with, and a good deal more fibre and nutrition than a plate of white rice ever did.

Lean hard on spices and seasoning

Here is the thing nobody warns you about. When you stop eating bread, rice and pasta, you lose a stack of bland, comforting bulk that was quietly carrying your meals, and if you do not replace it with flavour, low-carb food tastes flat and you give up. The fix is not a recipe, it is a spice cupboard and the confidence to use it.

Get bold. Cumin, coriander seed and turmeric give you the backbone of countless curries; fenugreek adds that slightly bitter, maple-ish note that makes a curry taste like a proper curry rather than a beige sauce. Smoked paprika brings depth to almost anything. Za’atar and sumac lift roasted vegetables out of dullness, fennel seed loves pork, garam masala and ras el hanout turn a tray of veg into something worth eating, and a spoon of harissa or a good chilli wakes the whole plate up. Beyond the dry spices, the everyday flavour-builders matter just as much: garlic, ginger, fresh herbs, a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar to cut the richness, and proper browning of your meat and veg, because the caramelised, seared edges are where a lot of the taste lives. Fat carries flavour too, so cook in something with character.

None of this needs a recipe. It needs you to stop treating spices as something you own three of and use twice a year, and start throwing them at things. The vegetables that bored you on day one become genuinely good once you season them like you mean it.

The one place you do need real recipes: dessert and baking

There is an honest exception, and it is baking. When you try to make a cake, biscuits, bread or anything that normally relies on wheat flour and sugar, you are doing real chemistry. Almond and coconut flour behave nothing like wheat, they absorb liquid differently and have no gluten to hold structure, and sugar alcohols like erythritol and allulose do not melt, brown or bulk up the way sugar does. You genuinely cannot wing this, so for keto desserts and baking it is worth finding properly tested recipes and following them closely, because the ratios are doing something specific. Pizza is the one savoury dish that belongs in this camp, because its base is essentially bread dough and the same chemistry applies; a fathead base, made from melted cheese and almond flour, or a cauliflower base genuinely scratches the itch, and both reward following a tested recipe rather than guessing. On a lazy night you can sidestep the whole problem and make a “pizza bowl”, all the toppings, sauce and cheese baked together with no base at all. That one exception aside, this is the small corner of keto cooking where the recipe collection earns its place. Everywhere else, you are better off freestyling. And it is no bad thing if dessert stays an occasional treat rather than a daily project.

How to actually think about dinner

Flip the whole approach around. Instead of opening your phone to search for a keto recipe, look at what you would have cooked anyway and adapt it on the spot. Identify the starch, cut it or swap it for a generous helping of vegetables, then make the rest taste excellent with spices, herbs, acid and a proper sear. Over a couple of weeks you build a small arsenal of go-to seasonings and vegetables, and the daily decision becomes effortless. It also dovetails with feeding a family, since the children can have the starch you left off your own plate, as the guide on keto with young children explains, and with adapting the dishes you already love, covered in adapting Belgian recipes.

A nice side effect: more plants, less money

This approach quietly fixes two of keto’s bad reputations. It costs far less, because you are buying vegetables and spices rather than bags of specialty flour and tubs of sweetener, and because you do not need to pay a monthly fee to one of the keto recipe subscription sites or meal-plan apps for the privilege of being told what to cook. For everyday savoury food there is nothing those services give you that a well-stocked spice rack and the approach above does not hand you for free. And it puts paid to the idea that keto is just meat and cheese, because done this way it is heavy on plants, fibre and variety, which is better for your gut and your overall health. You end up eating a wider range of vegetables than you probably did before, not a narrower one.

The bottom line

For savoury cooking, ditch the recipe hunt. Cook the food you already make, leave off or cut down the starch, replace it with more and more varied vegetables, and learn to season fearlessly with spices like cumin, turmeric, fenugreek and whatever else catches your eye. Save the proper recipes for dessert and baking, where the chemistry actually demands them. It is cheaper, less faff, more interesting, and it is the version of keto people manage to stick with.

This is general information about the ketogenic diet, not medical advice. Keto does not suit everyone; if you are pregnant, on medication, or managing a condition such as diabetes, speak to a doctor or dietitian first.