Help & FAQ

Cook is a plain-text recipe manager. Every recipe is a .cook text file that lives in your own folder — browse them, cook from them step by step, and build shopping lists from them.

Because they’re plain text, your recipes are yours to keep, read, and move anywhere. There’s no lock-in.

Your recipes appear on the My Recipes screen, grouped by folder. Tap a folder to open it, and use the back button to go up a level.

Pull down on the list to refresh and pick up changes you made on another device.

When you first open the app you pick a sync method: CookCloud (recommended — syncs automatically across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows and Linux), iCloud Drive (Apple devices only), or an on-device folder (stays on this device, with no automatic sync).

You can change this later in Settings.

As of now, manually typing recipe on a mobile device isn’t supported. Tap the ↓ button on the My Recipes screen. And clip one from the web or a photo. Also the app is integrated with OS share feature and you can clip recipes from a browser or camera roll.

Yes. Tap ↓, then choose the URL tab to paste a recipe link, or the Images tab to take a photo of a cookbook page or add screenshots. Clip Recipe reads the ingredients, steps and details and turns them into a clean Cooklang recipe you can edit.

Everything you clip becomes a plain-text file you own — available offline and synced to your other devices, with no lock-in.

Absolutely. Clip your favourites from the web or from photos, or drop existing .cook files straight into your synced folder and they’ll appear in the app.

Importing never traps your recipes — they stay ordinary text files you can back up or move whenever you like.

No. Use Clip Recipe to pull recipes in from a link or a photo instead of retyping them.

Open any recipe to see its name, key details (servings, prep and cook time, cuisine and more), the full ingredient list with quantities, any cookware you’ll need, and the step-by-step method.

Those details come from YAML frontmatter at the top of the .cook file.

Tap the scale button and either enter a multiplier (e.g. 2 to double, 0.5 to halve), set the number of servings you want, or tap any ingredient amount to scale the whole recipe around it. Numeric quantities update instantly.

Amounts like “a pinch” or “to taste” stay as they are, and timers don’t change — cooking times don’t scale the way quantities do.

Tap Start Cooking for a hands-free, one-step-at-a-time view in large text. It opens with a mise-en-place checklist so you can gather everything first, then swipe left and right to move between steps.

The screen stays awake so you don’t lose your place, and you can start any timer mentioned in a step with a single tap.

Tap a time in a cooking step (like “simmer for 10 minutes”) or set one manually. You can run several timers at once, and each alerts you when it finishes — even if the app is in the background or your phone is locked.

Make sure notifications are enabled for Cook so the alerts come through.

Put an image file next to the recipe with a matching name — Baked Potato.cook and Baked Potato.jpg — and it becomes the recipe’s header image.

You can add per-step images by including the step number in the name (Chicken French.0.jpg), or set image: in the recipe’s frontmatter to a local file or a URL.

Open a recipe and tap the Add to shopping list (shopping-cart) button. Every ingredient is added with its quantity — and if you’ve scaled the recipe, the scaled amounts are used.

Add as many recipes as you like and the list combines everything you need.

Switch between the Aisle and Recipe tabs at the top. Aisle view groups items by store section (fruit & veg, dairy, meat…) so you can shop in one pass. Recipe view groups items by which recipe they came from.

Yes. Add a config/aisle.conf file in your recipes folder, list sections as [section name] headers with their ingredients below, and use name|alias to match different spellings (for example whole milk|milk).

The list follows your section order, and the file syncs across your devices.

Tap an item to check it off, swipe left on an item to delete it, or use Clear All after a shopping trip. Tap the share button to send the list to family via Messages or Email.

With CookCloud, your recipes stay current on every device you sign into — iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows and Linux. Pull down on the recipe list to refresh, or tap Sync Now in Settings to update immediately. Settings also shows your sync status: Syncing, Synced, or an error if something needs attention.

Whatever device you’re on, your recipes stay plain-text files you own — sync just keeps a copy everywhere, with no lock-in.

Pick what suits you: CookCloud for automatic cross-platform sync, iCloud Drive if you’re all-Apple, or an on-device folder if you’d rather manage files yourself.

iOS and Android sync work the same way (iCloud Drive is the one Apple-only option). You can check or change your method in Settings.

Yes — completely. Every recipe is a plain-text .cook file stored in your own folder.

You can open it in any text editor, read it without the app, back it up, or move it elsewhere at any time. There’s no proprietary database and no lock-in — the app is just a nicer way to use files that are always yours.

Check your internet connection, pull down on the recipe list to refresh, then tap Sync Now in Settings. Make sure you’re signed into the same account on every device, and check Settings for a sync error message.

Switching between Wi-Fi and cellular can also help if the server is briefly unreachable.

Signing in uses a code emailed to you — there’s no password. If it doesn’t arrive, check your spam folder, confirm the email address is correct, wait a minute, and tap Resend Code.

Codes expire after 10 minutes, so always use the most recent one.

Check the file has a .cook extension and isn’t hidden (names starting with a dot are skipped). Confirm the Cooklang syntax is valid — ingredients as @ingredient{amount%unit} and cookware as #cookware{} — and that no brackets are missing.

Make sure the file is inside your recipes folder.

The image must sit in the same folder as the recipe and share its name — so pasta.cook pairs with pasta.jpg or pasta.png.

Enable notifications for Cook in your device settings — timers rely on notifications to alert you when they finish.