Cookify: Turn Any Recipe Into Clean Cooklang (URL, Photo, or Text)

You find a recipe you like. It's buried in a 2,000-word blog post, or it's a screenshot from a friend, or it's a photo of a page in a cookbook. Getting it into a form you can actually cook from — scale, build a shopping list, save for next time — usually means retyping the whole thing.

Cookify skips the retyping. Give it a recipe in almost any form, and it returns a clean Cooklang .cook file.

Three ways in

Cookify takes recipes however you have them:

Paste a URL. Drop in a link to a recipe page and Cookify reads the page, ignores the life story and the ads, and pulls out the recipe — ingredients, steps, times, and servings.

Upload a photo. Snap a picture of a cookbook page, a handwritten card, or a screenshot. Cookify reads the image and converts what it finds into structured text.

Drop in plain text. Copied a recipe from a message or a notes app? Paste the raw text and let Cookify do the structuring.

What you get back

The output isn't a screenshot or a PDF — it's a real Cooklang file:

---
title: Lemon Garlic Roast Chicken
servings: 4
prep_time: 15 minutes
cook_time: 1 hour 10 minutes
source: https://example.com/roast-chicken
---

Preheat the #oven{220%°C}.

Pat the @whole chicken{1.6%kg} dry and rub all over with @olive oil{2%tbsp},
@salt{2%tsp}, and @black pepper{1%tsp}.

Halve @lemon{1} and @garlic head{1} and tuck inside the cavity.

Roast for ~{1%hour}, then rest for ~{15%minutes} before carving.

Notice what happened: ingredients are tagged with @, cookware with #, and timers with ~. That structure is what makes the file useful. Once a recipe is in Cooklang, your tools can:

  • Scale it from 4 servings to 6 with correct quantities,
  • Build a shopping list that merges ingredients across several recipes, grouped by aisle,
  • Run timers straight from the steps,
  • Search by ingredient — "what can I make with the lentils I already have?"

None of that is possible with a screenshot.

Moving in from another app

Cookify isn't just for one-off recipes. If you have a whole collection trapped in another app, it reads exports from the usual suspects:

  • Paprika
  • Mela
  • Mealie
  • Tandoor
  • Recipe Keeper
  • Crouton
  • Plan to Eat
  • CopyMeThat
  • Nextcloud Cookbook
  • Cookmate

Export your library, hand the file to Cookify, and get back a folder of clean .cook files — one per recipe, all yours, no longer locked to a single app.

Why convert at all?

Because the .cook file is the durable thing. A URL can rot. A screenshot can't be searched or scaled. An app's private database can disappear with the app. A plain-text Cooklang file opens in any editor, syncs with anything, and reads the same in fifty years.

Cookify is the on-ramp: it gets recipes out of fragile places and into a format you control.

Try it

Cookify is part of [Cook.md](/). The fastest way to see it work is to grab a recipe link you like and convert it:

  1. Open Cookify on [Cook.md](/).
  2. Paste a URL, upload a photo, or drop in text.
  3. Review the generated .cook file and save it to your collection.

From there, Cook Editor and the mobile apps take over — preview, scale, shop, cook.

Unlimited recipe import from any URL is part of Cookbot Pro, €10/month. The format you get out is open and yours to keep, with or without a subscription.