Recipe Index

A note from Ben

Hi — my name is Ben.

I love home cooking, and I love cookbooks; to me there is no greater joy than learning about how recipes come to be, and leafing through a hefty tactile cookbook of food photography.

However. I don’t want to stain my cookbooks with sauce and oil (I do a lot). I also want an easier way to follow recipe directions, sub ingredients, set timers, and learn technique, without changing apps a million times. I think I built something that fixes a lot of those things.

I also believe recipes should be public knowledge! Most recipes are paywalled or (worse) there are 6,000 ads between you and a good dinner. It shouldn’t feel like a scavenger hunt to find the few important cooking steps in a tome of text.

So…. Recipe Index! Bring your recipes here and use the tools, or find a new recipe to try in the Index. I hope this is helpful and good, and that you cook something you love.

— Ben

What we do differently

There are a thousand recipe sites. Most of them are written for SEO, padded with five-paragraph essays about somebody's grandmother, and engineered to keep you scrolling past ads. Recipe Index is built for the moment you're actually standing at the stove.

• Bring your own recipe. Paste any link — blog, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. We strip the ads and pull out the recipe.
• A cook view that respects the kitchen. Step-by-step, hands-free, screen stays awake. Timers are inside the steps, not buried in a sidebar.
• The cookbook gets richer over time. When somebody cooks a recipe, they can pin a note to it — what worked, what they'd change. Future cooks see the stack.
• Community-built. Every recipe here got here because somebody cooked it. The library grows when you bring something to it.
• No ads, no paywalls, no popups. If we ever monetize, it'll be in ways that don't make the cooking experience worse.

See all the tools →

A cookbook the internet built

Recipe Index is collaborative on purpose. The recipes here came from cooks bringing them in — every link pasted, every cookbook page scanned, every recipe written from scratch becomes part of the index. When you cook, your notes get pinned to the recipe so the next person knows what you learned.

We credit sources wherever we can find them. We rewrite recipes in plain language so they're fast to follow at the stove. And we build for the cook, not the algorithm.

What we won't do

We won't put display ads between you and a recipe. We won't require you to make an account to read. We won't pretend a recipe was written by us when it wasn't. And we won't bury the cooking under a story about somebody's trip to Tuscany.

Built with care. No ads, no paywalls, no nonsense.