Cooked looks interesting: you add ‘cooked.wiki/’ in front of a recipe URL and it’ll show just the recipe, generate a shopping list, save it for later, etc.
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Should be interesting to watch. Wasn’t there a kerfuffle a few years ago about a substantially similar site? If my memory serves me well, the issue was that it was effectively showing the content of recipe sites without the ads (or their permission), and ultimately had to shut down. Recipes are big business on the web. I’m not a lawyer, but would love to hear one’s opinion on this.
I clicked a recipe on the Community page that was sourced from Food and Wine. It displayed the ingredients list and a link to the source, but the instructions section said this
Hmm. Every recipe I click has that language. Also their FAQ has a response to “How about copyright?”
Again, I’m not a lawyer, but this sounds iffy to me.
I've been using the app Mela for this for a long time now - really has been a useful tool for me (I think it cost a few dollars). At least with that app you do load the page in its original form before it scrapes it into a useable format. I can understand the copy infringement issues, for certain, but when they make the pages nearly impossible to actually read a recipe on . . .
+1 for Mela. It's a really lovely app and it's so nice to have the presentation of my fav recipes normalized. I have zero qualms about its scraper using it since the dominant use case is that I've already pulled up the recipe on the copyright owner's site—they got their $0.000005 ad revenue from me.
Another shout out for Mela, it's changed how I plan my menu. Its ability to scan cookbooks in addition to getting things off the web finally means all my recipes are in one spot. Love that it standardizes them too, and you can make them look pretty with subheads and whatnot. Still, if the recipe is in a cookbook I have, I'll usually rely on that.
Generally, I only get recipes off of cookbook blogs I already bought the cookbook for (I could get rid of every piece of physical media except cookbooks and still be happy), so I don't feel bad about scraping from the website because of that as well. I feel like cookbook authors are in a similar vein as musicians now, where the real money for the best artists is first generating a fanbase with free content, and then getting a share of that fanbase to buy literally anything you do. Molly Baz, Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman, Alexandra's Kitchen...
seriously the worst part of website recipes is the extensive "story" you have to scroll past to get to the ingredients list, and the huge disconnect between the ingredients and the instructions. I've taken to just asking chat gpt for recipes because it just lays it out there in a single view: ingredients and instructions.
If Cooked can bring that simplicity to all the random cooking websites, i'm in!
All of that "story" is what's turned me back on to just buying physical cookbooks. I have about 5 books centered around different cooking styles and I just refer to those and mix recipes/techniques to make whatever I'm trying to cook.
Pinterest offers a similar 'recipe scrape' feature, when you add a pin from a readable site it slurps in the ingredients / servings. Pinterest doesn't have the shopping list feature. (In both cases it doesn't work with every site)
Example: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/286471226291162406/
I've been using Plan to Eat for this. You do have to pay (but they always have a 50% off sale on Black Friday), but the $25 or $30 a year I pay is well worth it. The recipe import / scrape isn't always perfect, but it's pretty close. It converts Imperial units to metric for me, halves recipes (not perfectly if any of the measurements are imported in description but it's okay), and generates shopping lists that you can access in their app. I like it so much that I've mounted an iPad on the wall in my kitchen and cook off of all my recipes in their app. (Much less space than a cookbook stand.) It's been a gamechanger for me as we've travelled and moved across the world for sabbaticals, since I no longer have to lug cookbooks or remember what site each recipe is on.
And yeah, as noted above, the sites do make their money off of me because I have to see the recipe at their site first before I decide to import it, and I sometimes click back to the site to check something in the story.
I adore Paprika.app! It syncs between my laptop and my phone letting me make grocery lists on one and shop with the other. It does exactly what I want, I've been saving pretty much everything I make for years and it's so satisfying to plan a dinner by looking back at the things I've liked the best. Very happy customer here
Ah, the challenges of monetizing ideas through the internet.
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