Pantry Assistant

How to save recipes from any website

By the Pantry Assistant team

Last checked

Copy the recipe's web address, paste it into a recipe app, and let the app pull in the ingredients and steps. Or use the share button in your browser. Either way you end up with one clean copy and none of the page around it.

Saving a bookmark is not the same as saving a recipe. A bookmark keeps a link to a page full of ads, life stories and pop-ups, and the page may change or vanish. A saved recipe keeps the part you cook from. This guide covers the ways to do it, what can go wrong, and what to do when it does.

Three ways to save a recipe

You do not need special software for the first two.

  1. Bookmark it. Fast, but the recipe stays on someone else's page. Fine for a recipe you may never make.
  2. Copy and paste. Select the ingredients and steps, paste them into a note. It works anywhere, and it keeps only what you chose. It is slow, and your notes end up scattered.
  3. Import it. A recipe app reads the page for you and files the result next to your other recipes. It is the quickest way once you have a few recipes to keep.

If you cook from a handful of recipes, a note is enough. Once you have dozens, you want them in one searchable place, with the ingredients matched to your kitchen.

Owners and Editors in a kitchen add recipes, and everyone in the kitchen sees them.

  1. Open Recipes and tap Add.
  2. Paste the recipe's web address under From a website.
  3. Tap Import recipe.

The app pulls in the photo, the ingredients and the steps, and matches the ingredients to your pantry. If you are offline, it imports the link once you are back online.

Share from your browser

On iPhone, iPad and Android, you can skip the pasting. Open the recipe in your browser or another app, tap the share button, and choose Pantry Assistant. It opens Recipes and starts the import.

This is the version people use most, because you are already looking at the recipe when you decide to keep it.

What import reads, and what it does not

Import reads the recipe a website publishes for search engines: its name, photo, ingredients and steps. When a page has that, the result is clean, because the site wrote it in a form made to be read by software.

It does not read everything. Some pages hide the recipe behind a video or a login. A few sites turn away apps. And a page with no recipe on it, like a blog post that only describes a dinner, has nothing to import.

We measured this rather than guessing. In a test on 2026-10-17, the import reader produced a usable recipe, with a name, at least one ingredient and at least one step, from 92 of 101 popular recipe pages. Of the 9 misses, 8 were sites that refused the request, and 1 was a page written as plain paragraphs with nothing structured to read.

That test ran from a laptop, so read it as how far the reader gets, not a promise for any one site. Sites that block servers are the main reason an import fails. On a phone, the app reads the page itself first and asks our server only if that fails, which helps with some of them.

When an import does fail, the app says why. It keeps the link and guesses the name, so you can tap Write it myself and add the rest. Nothing is lost.

Check the result

Open the recipe and read it once before you rely on it. Look at three things.

  • The ingredient amounts. Make sure nothing is cut off, like "2 cups" with no ingredient.
  • The steps. They should run from first to last, with nothing missing in the middle.
  • The servings and time. These come from the page, so they are only as good as the page.

If something is wrong, edit the recipe. It is yours to change.

Write your own

Not every recipe comes from a website. The one you make from memory, or your grandmother's card, deserves a place too.

Tap Add, then Write my own. Give it a name, how many it serves and the total time. Type the ingredients one per line, or paste a whole list and the app splits it. Add the steps and tap Save recipe.

New kitchens also come with 71 Starter Recipes, checked by us, so there is something to cook from on day one. Tap Save to our recipes on one to make it yours to change.

Cook from it

A saved recipe is useful when your hands are full. Under Method, tap Cook mode for one step at a time. Tap Read aloud to hear each step, and tap a time in a step to start a timer.

Each ingredient says whether you have it, need it or always have it. Tap + beside one you need to add it to your shopping list.

When you finish, tap I made this. The app takes each ingredient off your pantry, oldest first, and foods you always have stay. You can undo it.

Keep the habit small

Save a recipe when you decide to make it, not when you find it. A collection of fifty recipes you meant to cook is just a bigger pile of bookmarks.

Save the ones you made and liked. Next month, the recipes you cook are the ones you saved after the first try.

For every button and the cases where import cannot read a page, see the Help article below.