You found the perfect midweek dinner on Pinch of Yum. A showstopper cake on Sally's Baking Addiction. That one-pot pasta your friend swore by on Budget Bytes. You bookmarked them all. And now? They're buried somewhere between 47 browser tabs, a screenshot folder you haven't opened since last year, and a note on your phone that just says "chicken thing."
Sound familiar? You're not alone. Most home cooks have recipes scattered across a dozen different places - and when it's 6pm and you need dinner ideas, none of them are easy to find.
That's exactly why we built Recipe Shelf. One app to import, organise, and access every recipe you care about - whether it came from a website, a cookbook, a TikTok video, or your grandma's handwritten card.
In this post, we'll walk you through every way to get recipes into Recipe Shelf, starting with the fastest: importing directly from a URL.
Import recipes from supported websites
The quickest way to save a recipe is to paste a URL into Recipe Shelf. We'll pull in the title, ingredients, instructions, cook time, servings, and the recipe photo - all in a few seconds.
Here's how it works:
1.
Copy the URL of a recipe from any of our supported sites.
2.
Paste it into the Recipe Shelf URL import bar.
3.
Hit import. Recipe Shelf reads the page, extracts the recipe data using AI, and presents it to you for review.
4.
Edit anything you'd like (swap an ingredient, tweak a title), then save.
That's it. No copy-pasting ingredients one by one. No reformatting instructions. The recipe lands in your collection ready to cook.
Which websites are supported?
We currently support 30 popular recipe websites, including:
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BBC Good Food (bbcgoodfood.com)
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Budget Bytes (budgetbytes.com)
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Half Baked Harvest (halfbakedharvest.com)
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Pinch of Yum (pinchofyum.com)
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RecipeTin Eats (recipetineats.com)
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Sally's Baking Addiction (sallysbakingaddiction.com)
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Minimalist Baker (minimalistbaker.com)
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Skinnytaste (skinnytaste.com)
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Love and Lemons (loveandlemons.com)
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Smitten Kitchen (smittenkitchen.com)
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Taste of Home (tasteofhome.com)
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King Arthur Baking (kingarthurbaking.com)
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Cookie and Kate (cookieandkate.com)
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Natasha's Kitchen (natashaskitchen.com)
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Damn Delicious (damndelicious.net)
Why not every recipe site?
Good question. We could technically try to scrape any website, but we deliberately chose not to. Here's why.
Every recipe website structures its pages differently. Some use standardised recipe markup (called JSON-LD) that makes extraction straightforward. Others bury the recipe inside ad-heavy layouts, pop-ups, and creative formatting that makes it much harder to reliably pull out the right data.
Rather than give you a half-extracted recipe with missing ingredients or jumbled instructions, we test each site individually before adding it to our supported list. When you import from a supported site, you can trust that the recipe will come through accurately.
We're adding new sites regularly. If your favourite site isn't supported yet, you can request it - and we prioritise the most-requested ones.
What about sites that block importing?
Some popular recipe websites actively block automated access. Sites like AllRecipes, Serious Eats, and Simply Recipes (all owned by Dotdash Meredith) use anti-scraping technology that prevents apps like Recipe Shelf from reading their pages. Other sites use Cloudflare or Vercel bot protection that returns a security challenge instead of the recipe.
This isn't something we can work around - these sites have chosen to restrict automated access, and we respect that. But you're not out of luck. There are still easy ways to save recipes from these sites, which brings us to the next option.
Copy and paste with Smart Paste
If a recipe comes from a site we don't support - or any site that blocks importing - you can use Smart Paste. It's almost as fast as URL import.
Here's how:
1.
Go to the recipe on the website.
2.
Select and copy the recipe content - the title, ingredients, and instructions. You don't need to be precise about what you select. Grab the whole recipe section, even if some extra text comes along with it.
3.
In Recipe Shelf, tap Add Recipe and choose Smart Paste.
4.
Paste the copied text. Recipe Shelf's AI will parse it and separate the title, ingredients, and instructions into the right fields automatically.
5.
Review, tweak if needed, and save.
Smart Paste works with messy, unformatted text. It doesn't matter if the ingredients and instructions run together, or if there's ad copy mixed in. The AI sorts it out.
This is also a great option for recipes shared in Facebook groups, Reddit threads, email newsletters, or anywhere else that isn't a traditional recipe website.
Take a photo of a recipe
Got a recipe in a cookbook? On a handwritten card from your nan? Printed out on a stained piece of paper that's been stuck to the fridge for ten years?
Recipe Shelf can handle that too. Just take a photo.
1.
Tap Add Recipe and choose Photo Upload.
2.
Take a photo of the recipe, or select one from your camera roll.
3.
Recipe Shelf uses OCR (optical character recognition) to read the text in the image, then structures it into a proper recipe with separate fields for title, ingredients, and instructions.
4.
Review the extracted recipe, fix anything the OCR got wrong, and save.
This is especially useful for:
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Cookbooks - save your favourites from physical books without typing them out by hand.
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Magazine clippings - that pasta recipe you tore out of a magazine in 2014 can finally live somewhere useful.
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Printed recipes - any recipe on paper becomes searchable and editable in your collection.
The OCR works best with clear, well-lit photos where the text is readable. Handwriting works too, though very cursive or faded writing may need some manual corrections after import.
Enter a recipe manually
Sometimes the simplest approach is the right one. If you're creating your own recipe, adapting something from memory, or just want full control from the start, manual entry is there for you.
1.
Tap Add Recipe and choose Manual Entry.
2.
Fill in the fields: title, ingredients, instructions, servings, cook time, prep time, and an optional photo.
Manual entry is perfect for:
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Your own recipes - the ones in your head that you've never written down.
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Family recipes told over the phone - "Mum, how much butter again?"
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Adapted recipes - when you've changed enough that you want to start fresh rather than edit an import.
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Simple recipes - sometimes a recipe is just "toast bread, add avocado, squeeze lemon, season." It doesn't need to be imported from anywhere.
So what's the best way to import recipes?
It depends on where the recipe lives:
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Supported website → URL import - paste the link, done in seconds
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Unsupported or blocked website → Smart Paste - copy the recipe text, paste it in
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Facebook group, Reddit, email, text message → Smart Paste - works with any copied text
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Cookbook or printed recipe → Photo upload - snap a photo
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Handwritten recipe card → Photo upload - digitise it
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Your own recipe from memory → Manual entry - type it in
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TikTok recipe video → URL import - paste the TikTok link (we'll embed the video too) - see our guide to
saving recipes from TikTok No matter where a recipe comes from, Recipe Shelf gives you a way to save it. And once it's in your collection, it's searchable, editable, shareable, and accessible from any device - web, Android, or iOS.
Get started
Don't see your favourite recipe site on our supported list?
Check the full list and request any site you'd like us to add. We prioritise based on community requests, and new sites are added regularly.