Import Recipes in Your Units, with Your TagsCook Basic & Pro
Recipes online come in whatever units, tags and serving size the author used. Import preferences let you set yours once, in your profile. After that, every recipe you import from a link, pasted text or a photo is converted to Cooklang and then adjusted to match, so you don't fix the same things by hand each time.
The Import preferences section of your profile: Metric units, Add tags, and a list of your own tags.
What you need
- To be signed in with Cook Basic or Cook Pro. Accounts on the free plan, and legacy accounts that were grandfathered into free sync, can save the settings but they aren't applied. Compare plans on the pricing page.
- For diet substitutions, a saved diet, allergens or dislikes (step 3).
The four settings
Each setting is optional. Anything you leave unset is left exactly as the source had it. The adjustments are made by an AI model after the recipe has been converted, as a small set of find-and-replace edits to the finished recipe, and the result is checked before it's kept: if an adjustment would change the structure of the recipe, you get the unadjusted recipe instead.
Units: Original, Metric or Imperial
Metric converts ingredient quantities, oven temperatures and pan or tin sizes. Cup and spoon measures of dry goods
become grams, using common densities (a cup of flour is not a cup of sugar). Imperial goes the other way,
to cups, ounces and °F. Counts (2 eggs) and vague amounts (a pinch) are left alone.
Original does nothing.
Add tags, and Your tags
With Add tags on, the recipe's tags in its frontmatter are filled in. Tags the source already had are kept,
and the merged list holds at most 8 tags, lowercase, with hyphens instead of spaces.
- Your tags empty: the model suggests up to five from the recipe: cuisine, course, a diet it already satisfies, and style.
- Your tags filled in (comma-separated, up to 50): only tags from your list are applied, and only the ones that fit. A recipe that fits none gets none. This is how every import ends up tagged the same way, with the words you actually search by.
Substitute for my diet
Swaps ingredients that conflict with your saved diet, allergens or dislikes for a common substitute in the same role, and keeps a note of the original. Ingredients that don't conflict are not touched. In Cooklang, a swap looks like this:
---
title: Pasta al forno
servings: 4
---
Stir in @olive oil{40%ml}(instead of 50 g butter).If you've saved no diet, allergens or dislikes, there's nothing to substitute and this setting does nothing.
Servings
A number from 1 to 24. All quantities are scaled to that many servings, rounded sensibly, and servings in the frontmatter is updated.
If the source doesn't say how many it serves, there's nothing to scale from and the setting is skipped.
1. Sign in
Sign in to the account that has Cook Basic or Cook Pro, on the web and in the app. The settings belong to your account, so they apply wherever you import.
2. Set your preferences
Open Profile → Edit and scroll to Import preferences. Pick your units, switch on the settings you want, optionally enter your tags and a servings number, and save. The settings are stored for any account, so if your plan lapses and you come back, they're still there.
3. Set your diet
If you use Substitute for my diet, tell Cook what to avoid at Food and cooking preferences: your dietary preferences, allergens and ingredients you dislike. "No restrictions" counts as no diet. The Import preferences section shows what will be used.
4. Import a recipe
Import as usual: paste a link, paste text or upload a photo on Cookify, or use the Cook app. When your preferences are applied, the Cookify page shows Applying: … above the form, and the result page shows a pill for each thing that actually changed, such as "Metric units", "3 tags added" or "2 substitutions" (hover a substitution pill to see what replaced what). If an adjustment changed nothing, or was rejected by the checks, no pill appears and you get the recipe as converted.
Import preferences apply to the web Cookify page and to link, text and photo imports in the Cook mobile apps. They don't change recipes you already have: import again to apply new settings.
What it doesn't do
- It doesn't apply to batch imports from Paprika, Mela and other apps.
- It's a fixed set of options, not free-text instructions. For anything else, ask CookBot (Cook Pro) to edit the recipe.
- Volume-to-weight conversions use typical densities, so check anything precise, like baking.
- Substitutions are suggestions from an AI model. Check allergens yourself, especially for medical allergies.