Write Your First Recipe in Cooklang in Five Minutes

Cooklang looks intimidating if you've never seen it. But it's actually simpler than Markdown. Let me show you.

The basic idea

Cooklang is plain text with a few simple markers. Ingredients get an at symbol. Timings get a tilde. That's most of it. Your recipe stays readable, and computers can parse it too.

Your first recipe: Carbonara

Open Cook Editor and create a new file. Type this:

---
title: Carbonara
servings: 4
---

Boil @spaghetti{400%g} in salted water.

Fry @pancetta{200%g} until crispy, then add @garlic{2%cloves} for ~{30%seconds}.

Whisk @eggs{4} with @parmesan{100%g}.

Drain pasta, toss with pancetta, then with eggs.

That's it. You've written a recipe in Cooklang.

Breaking it down

The stuff between the dashes at the top is metadata — title and servings. Cook uses this to organize and scale your recipes.

@spaghetti{400%g} means the ingredient is spaghetti, the amount is 400 grams. The at symbol tells Cook "this is an ingredient."

~{30%seconds} is a timing — 30 seconds. The tilde marks time.

Everything else is just normal cooking instructions. No special syntax needed.

Scaling up

Want to cook for 8 people instead of 4? Change servings to 8. Cook automatically scales every ingredient. 400 grams of spaghetti becomes 800 grams. No math, no confusion.

Going deeper

That covers the essentials, but Cooklang has more. You can organize recipes with sections, reference other ingredients, express complex techniques — all while keeping your file readable. For the full syntax and advanced features, check the Cooklang documentation.

Next steps

That's genuinely it. Write your instructions in plain English, wrap ingredients in @name{amount} and timings in ~{duration}, and you're done. Save it as a .cook file and you can open it anywhere — any editor, any device, forever.

Ready to write more? Head to Cook Editor and start building your recipe collection.