Digital recipe management for fastidious cooks

Much like your favourite recipe websites, I'm not going to get straight to the point, I'm going to start with a backstory and you're not getting a skip link.

Having grown up with a dad who read cookbooks for leisure, and who caused me to turn vegetarian for several weeks once at the age of 13 when he presented me with a lamb heart stew for dinner, it was inevitable that I would be a foodie. Dad’s squid and red wine stew was my favourite dish as a child. He can't cook any more, but I have fond memories of those meals (even if I did eat as fast as I could so I could leave the table and go back on MSN) and I owe my inquisitive palate to his globetrotting home cooking. As middle-class Brits go, I’m as Waitrose as they come: say “Ottolenghi” three times into a Guardian tote bag and I’ll appear in a puff of sumac.

These days, cooking for people is how I show love, which I definitely got from Dad. While the novelty's worn off for feeding myself and my husband (sorry James), I really enjoy having people over and putting on a spread (even if the kitchen then looks like a hurricane tore through it). Even at university, we used to hold parties in our student house where I'd cook for two solid days making sliders with homemade buns, big pots of chilli, clumsily-knotted pretzels, salads and cakes. Every Christmas I spend a weekend baking biscuits and sweets to post out to friends and family.

I used to have a shelf full of cookbooks. Only instead of being lovingly creased and food-stained through use like my parents’ books are, mine sat on a shelf gathering dust, largely untouched, pages spotless and not at all stuck together. My problem is that I have very poor object permanence: if something’s not in immediate sight, I will forget it’s there. I couldn’t remember the recipes that I had in the books, or even that I had the books in the first place, so I never used them. (The same logic applies to the very old packets of various seasonings in the kitchen cupboards.)

I’ve found the only way I reliably use recipes is if I have them available digitally. I’ve been collecting recipes from food blogs and recipe websites for a long time now - originally storing them in Evernote, which is what we did in the 2010s.

And somehow, over the last decade, I’ve amassed over 5,000 recipes. Have I made all of them? Of course I haven’t. And there's definitely a few I come back to again and again. But it’s nice to know I have them in case I find myself in desperate need of a carrot cake recipe (or five).

Paprika

For the last 7 years or so I’ve been using Paprika 3 to manage my digital recipe collection. It’s a solid cross-platform app with cloud sync and a one-off cost per-platform rather than a subscription. I can clip recipes on my laptop, plan the next week's meals on my phone on the train, and I've got an old iPad sitting on the kitchen counter to view the recipe on while I'm cooking.

All the recipe management apps I’ve tried have largely the same features:

• clip recipes from the web
• browse recipe websites from within the app, and download recipes
• create recipes from scratch
• scale and convert ingredient units
• tag recipes
• create meal plans
• create shopping lists from recipes

I've categorised my recipes into what book they came from, different types of baked goods, different situations - for example, I've got a "quick weeknight dinners" category that's great if we just need something fast for dinner midweek.

Goldilocks and the three recipe managers

Paprika is a stalwart in the recipe app scene (and believe me, I’ve tried most of them), but it hadn’t been updated for years and I was getting a bit frustrated. It was so good, but lacked any kind of smart features - I was so bored of manually tagging recipes, and my extremely convoluted way of digitising recipe books and importing them into my collection was tedious as hell. My kingdom for literally any kind of OCR COME ON PEOPLE IT'S 2026. (Though while writing this I have just come across this Paprika Recipe Parser tool which I’ll definitely try out.)

Some newer competitors came on the scene post-2020, and offered some nice features Paprika didn’t have. Pestle is a lovely-looking app which has really leant into the capabilities of Apple Intelligence, making importing super easy, and also supports importing from Instagram and TikTok; Mela (by the same person who built Reeder) integrates with Apple Reminders and has a built-in RSS reader, which would be perfect for the food blogs I subscribe to. But I always found myself coming back to Paprika because other apps didn’t support nested recipe folders (which sounds incredibly nitpicky, but is a non-negotiable for me!).

I mentioned I had an extremely convoluted way of importing recipes from recipe books to my Paprika collection. Well.

If it’s a physical cookbook, I have to take photos of the pages, use Apple’s OCR in Preview to copy the text, then manually create the recipe in Paprika, which is so boring I rarely actually get round to it. If it’s an ebook, it’s a ridiculous workflow that I think I found on Reddit:

• import epub into Calibre
• convert the book to ZIP (an archive of HTML files)
• extract into a folder
• fix some of the garbled XHTML files that Calibre inevitably outputs
• run a local HTTP server in the folder
• open the IP address in Paprika’s in-app browser, and clip each recipe individually while half-watching ER (and I can't even use the "Download recipe" button because there are usually several recipes per outputted page)

Given how boring that was to read, I'm sure you can guess how often I can be bothered to do that.

* If you're wondering why I don't just build one myself that does everything I want it to, the answer is that I have enough software maintenance to do in my day job, and my free time is for petting dogs

Paprika 4 is here and it does the thing now

Great news for me: I happened to look at Paprika’s website yesterday and saw that they’d opened up the Paprika 4 beta, which supports - yesssss - recipe importing from photos and social media, recipe sharing, bulk categorisation, as well as being able to guess what categories you might want to add to a recipe! I’m extremely particular about the categories I want on my recipes, but also too lazy to scroll down a list and add them to recipes one by one, so this is a total game changer. (It is LLM-powered, so isn’t perfect - it keeps trying to categorise everything as being from “Dinner” by Meera Sodha - but I expect it’ll stop doing that eventually.)

I tested it out by importing recipes from the Farmer J cookbook I’d picked up from a charity shop. It worked a treat! It’s basically completely shortcutted the workflow I had going before, and I don’t need to fill out any of the metadata except the category (which, as I mentioned, is super quick to do now).

Having switched to buying only epubs, I miss having a shelf full of cookbooks, so maybe I’ll start buying physical ones again if they're this simple to import now - I love it when I go to someone’s house and they have a copy of a cookbook I really like - or I can just screenshot ebook pages to import them, which is slightly less convenient but still way easier than the stupid dance I had to do before.

Paprika 4 will be moving to a subscription model, which is unsurprising - the new features use LLMs, which aren't free. But it looks like existing users can keep using Paprika for free without the new features if they want.

And if you ever need a good recipe, let me know - I've got a few.