The recipe notebook for cooks who care.

Capture recipes from anywhere, refine them across seasons, cook them step by step, and keep them yours forever.

Try free on iPhone, iPad, and Mac See every feature

Built for serious cooks.

Professional chefs

Station recipes live in your head until they do not. Chef Notebook gives working cooks a place to document every dish, record refinements after each service, and scale for any cover count. When a sauce evolves over a season, the version history is right there. When a line cook needs the recipe, you can share it as a formatted image in seconds. Nothing gets lost in a text thread or a greasy notebook.

Serious home cooks

You have a folder of clipped magazine pages, a phone camera roll full of handwritten index cards, and three browser tabs open to the same recipe you keep losing. Chef Notebook is the single place that respects all of it: import from a URL, snap a photo of a printed card, or type it from memory. Tag it, scale it for a dinner party, save a version when you finally nail it. One place, all of it yours.

How it works.

Capture

Type, paste a URL, snap a photo of a printed card, or send from Safari with the Share Sheet.

Refine

Edit ingredients and steps, scale to any serving size, save versions, and branch variations.

Cook

Open Cook Mode, run multiple timers, check off ingredients, and let Siri turn the page for you.

01. Capture

Bring every recipe in.

A recipe notebook is only useful if it holds everything. Chef Notebook makes it frictionless to bring in recipes from the web, from physical pages, from the cookbook on your shelf, and from anywhere else a recipe lives.

Import from anywhere

Paste a URL and the app extracts ingredients and steps from any recipe site. Prefer physical sources? Import up to 50 photos of a printed or handwritten recipe: cookbooks, magazine pages, old index cards. The Share Sheet lets you send a recipe straight from Safari without even copying the URL. Every Import lands on a Review screen where you can fix the title, correct ingredients, and adjust step order before anything is saved to your collection.

A real photo gallery

Attach as many photos as you like to any recipe. Chef Notebook stores a full photo gallery for each dish, not just a single hero shot. Link photos to individual steps as Step reference photos so Cook Mode can show you what the sauce should look like before you pull it off the heat. Crop any photo to focus on what matters most. Cropping is non-destructive: the original is always preserved and you can adjust or reset the crop at any time. Every photo syncs automatically across your devices.

Search and tag your library

As your collection grows, Search keeps it findable. Type a name or an ingredient and results update as you type. Tags let you organize by mood or occasion: add custom colored tags like Weeknight, Dessert, or Holiday, then filter by tag to narrow your list instantly. Select multiple tags to find recipes that match all of them at once. When a recipe belongs to an older chapter of your cooking life, Archive it instead of deleting it. Archived recipes stay findable through Search and tag filters and can be unarchived at any time.

02. Develop

Refine across seasons.

Good recipes do not arrive finished. They accumulate edits: a gram more salt after tasting it cold, a variation that swaps the protein, a scaling note from the last time you made it for twelve. Chef Notebook is built to hold that kind of iterative thinking.

Edit and scale with care

Tap Edit on any recipe to change its name, ingredients, quantities, steps, cook time, prep time, servings, cuisine, tags, and notes. Sort your recipe list by name, newest, or oldest. When a dish needs to feed more people, Scale to any serving size: half portions, double, triple, or a custom number. Cooking-sensitive ingredients like salt and leavening are adjusted carefully so the dish still tastes right at any size. The scaled recipe is saved as a new variation so the original is always safe.

Components for multi-part dishes

Components split a recipe into named parts, each with its own ingredients and steps. Use them for multi-part dishes: a pie with a Crust and a Filling, a pasta dish with a Sauce and the Pasta itself, a composed dessert with three distinct elements. Each component stays organized through editing and throughout Cook Mode. When you cook, each component gets its own tab so you can focus on one part of the dish at a time without scrolling past irrelevant steps.

Version control for cooks

Tap Save Version while editing and the app creates a permanent snapshot numbered v1.0, v1.1, v1.2. From then on you have a returnable version history for everything. Create a variation to branch a recipe into an independent copy with its own version sequence. Name it "Vegan" or "Low-Salt" and develop it separately. The history timeline shows every saved state newest first; toggle to a graph view to see a visual branching diagram of all versions and variations. Tap any version to Restore it. Tap "See Changes" on any version to Compare them side-by-side, with a clear diff of which ingredients were added or removed and which steps changed.

03. Cook

Stay in the moment.

Cook Mode strips away everything that is not the next step. Your screen stays on, the text is large, and the tools you need during cooking are exactly where you expect them.

Cook Mode

Tap Cook on any recipe to enter Cook Mode: a distraction-free view that shows one step at a time, keeps your screen on, and tracks your progress with a visible counter. The ingredients checklist lets you see all ingredients at once and check them off as you gather them. Each step card also shows its own ingredients inline so you can verify you have everything before you start that step. Use Previous and Next to move through steps, swipe left or right, or tap Mark Complete to advance automatically.

Independent timers

Steps with a set duration show a Start Timer button. Run as many Timers as the recipe demands simultaneously: one for a braise simmering, one for resting meat, one for a sauce reducing. Each timer runs independently and stays visible no matter which step you navigate to. Timers keep counting even if you switch to a different app for a moment. When a timer finishes, the notification brings you right back to where you were.

Hands free with Siri

Keep your hands on the food. Siri voice commands control Cook Mode completely without touching your device. Say "Next step in Chef Notebook" to advance, "Previous step in Chef Notebook" to go back, or "Mark step done in Chef Notebook" to complete the current step. Works any time your hands are full or covered in dough. On iPhone and iPad, recipes with multiple components show Component tabs at the top of Cook Mode so you can switch between the Sauce and the Pasta without losing your place in either.

05. Own

Yours, always.

Your recipes belong to you. Chef Notebook is designed around that principle: automatic sync keeps them on every device, thoughtful settings respect how you work, and export means you are never locked in.

Synced across your Apple devices

Your recipes, photos, tags, and collections sync automatically via iCloud across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. There are no manual steps beyond signing in with the same Apple ID. Everything stays current on every device: a recipe you edit on your iPad at the counter is available on your Mac when you sit down to plan the week's menu. Sync is automatic, private, and handled entirely by Apple's infrastructure.

Settings that respect how you work

Switch between Imperial (cups, tablespoons, ounces, pounds) and Metric (grams, milliliters, liters) measurement systems whenever you like. Show ingredient quantities as fractions (1/2 cup) or decimals (0.5 cup). Enable smart unit suggestions that recommend appropriate units as you type ingredient quantities, so you spend less time thinking about whether 400g of flour needs to be listed differently. Settings sync across devices and take effect immediately.

Trash and recovery

Deleting a recipe is not permanent. When you remove a recipe it moves to Recently Deleted, not permanent removal. Open Recently Deleted from the recipe list to see every deleted recipe and the number of days remaining before it is gone for good. Recipes stay recoverable for 30 days. Tap Restore to return a recipe to your main collection with every photo, ingredient, step, tag, and version of its history fully intact. When you are ready to clear things out, tap Empty Trash to permanently remove everything at once.

Collections, nested

Group related recipes into named Collections: Weeknight Dinners, Holiday Baking, Meal Prep, or anything that matches how you cook. Collections appear in the sidebar alongside your full recipe list. Create a sub-collection inside any collection for finer organization: a Baking collection can hold sub-collections for Cakes, Cookies, and Breads. Nesting goes one level deep. Move any recipe between collections by long-pressing and choosing Move to Collection, or by dragging it directly onto a collection in the sidebar.

Export everything

From Settings, tap Export All Recipes to generate a portable file of your entire recipe library. The export follows the Schema.org Recipe standard as JSON-LD, so it can be opened in any text editor, imported by other tools, or archived independently of any app. Save it to Files, send it via AirDrop, or email it to yourself. This is your data: structured, open, and yours to take anywhere.

Ready to keep what you cook?

Try free on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Your recipes never touch our servers.

Your recipes are stored in your private Apple iCloud account, encrypted by Apple, scoped to your Apple ID. We never see them. We never store them. We never analyze them. They are yours.

There is no server-side database holding your recipes. There is no back end to breach, no company database to subpoena, no acquisition to worry about. When you create or edit a recipe in Chef Notebook, that data moves directly between your devices through Apple's encrypted iCloud infrastructure. The developer has zero ability to read your recipe collection, because the recipe collection never passes through any system the developer controls.

You may notice that this very page loads with no tracking scripts, no analytics pixels, no third-party embeds of any kind. That is intentional. The privacy commitment is not limited to the app: it extends to how we operate every part of this project.

Yours to keep, even if you leave.

We make it easy to leave. Tap Export All Recipes in Settings and you get a portable JSON-LD file of your entire library, in the open Schema.org standard, that any tool can read. Open it in any text editor, import it into another app, archive it to an external drive, or hand it to a developer to build something new. The file is yours, structured as plain text, readable without any special software.

The Schema.org Recipe vocabulary is the same standard that search engines use to understand recipe pages on the web. It is not a proprietary format invented by Chef Notebook. Using an open standard means your recipes are future-proof: even if Chef Notebook ceased to exist tomorrow, your library would remain readable, importable, and useful. We will never remove the Export All Recipes feature. User data ownership is the default, not a feature we can take away.

A note from the maker.

Hi, I'm Casey. I'm a software engineer based in the USA, and I cook.

Chef Notebook started because I could not find a recipe app that respected both my cooking and my data. My recipes lived across a camera roll full of handwritten index cards, a Notes.app folder I was embarrassed by, a few browser bookmarks I could never find again, and a paper notebook I kept losing. I wanted one place. I also wanted that place to be private, and to feel like a real tool rather than a free service running on my data. So I built it.

Every piece of in-app feedback comes to me personally. I read it. I reply when I can. The roadmap is shaped by what real cooks ask for, not by growth metrics or investor priorities. When you send a feature request through the app, I see it. Some of the best ideas in Chef Notebook came directly from people who cook and knew exactly what was missing.

Chef Notebook is made and supported in the USA by one person. That will not always be the fastest, but it means the person who answers your question and the person who wrote the code are the same.

Casey Smith

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Chef Notebook

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