The short answer
Save the recipe itself rather than only a link to the page. A recipe app that imports from a link (Culinary Card is one) does this in one paste and pulls out the title, ingredients, steps and cook time; copying just the recipe into a notes app also works, with more of the tidying done by hand. Check the saved copy against the page once, add a tag, and you can find it again by ingredient or source even after the page changes or goes offline.
Step-by-step
- 1
Copy the link and paste it where you keep recipes
This works on a food blog, NYT Cooking, Serious Eats, Bon Appétit or somebody's personal cooking site. On a phone, use the share or copy-link option in your browser; on a computer, copy the address bar (Cmd/Ctrl+L, then Cmd/Ctrl+C).
- 2
If the link will not import, paste the text
Some pages sit behind a login, or only say the recipe out loud in a video. When a link comes back thin or empty, copy whatever recipe text you can see and paste that instead. In Culinary Card, the same Text or link box takes pasted text and structures it the same way.
- 3
Give the saved copy a quick look
Check that the ingredients and steps came through the way you expect. Recipe pages vary a lot in how they are written, and a note tucked into the middle of a paragraph will occasionally land somewhere odd. Fix anything that is off now, while the page is still open to compare.
- 4
Add a tag while it is in front of you
One word you might search for later is enough: "weeknight", "vegetarian", "for company". It takes about ten seconds now, and it is the sort of thing nobody goes back and does in bulk.
- 5
Find it again by whatever you remember
Search by an ingredient, part of the title, or the site it came from. The source matters more than you might expect, because "that Serious Eats chicken thing" is often all you have to go on.
Common mistakes to avoid
- ✕
Relying on a bookmark alone
A bookmark is the fastest way to save a page, and it holds up until the page is redesigned, moves behind a paywall or disappears, none of which comes with a warning. It also means loading the full ad-heavy page every time you want to re-check the oven temperature.
- ✕
Keeping recipes only as screenshots
Screenshots are instant and they work offline, which is useful. But you cannot search them by ingredient, so a year later you have hundreds of images in your camera roll and no way to ask which one had the buttermilk in it.
- ✕
Treating Pinterest as storage
Pinterest is good at showing you things you did not know you wanted, and less good at getting you back to one specific recipe. You do not have to give it up: pin as freely as you like, and save a proper copy of the ones you intend to cook.
- ✕
Pasting the whole page into a notes app
A notes app is a real step up from a bookmark, because you own the text and can search it. Pasting the entire page brings the life story, the ads and the comments with it, though, and the recipe ends up buried in the middle. Copying only the ingredients and steps keeps each note short enough to cook from.
Why Culinary Card works for this
Culinary Card was built around this workflow. Paste a website link or a Pinterest pin and it pulls out a structured recipe (title, ingredients, steps, cook time and difficulty) that you can search, with no ads on top, on a laptop or a phone. Import quality does depend on the page: a site that hides its recipe inside a video, or behind a login, will give you a thinner card than a well-marked-up food blog.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work with any recipe website?
Most of them. Food blogs and big publications like NYT Cooking or Serious Eats usually publish their recipe in a standard format that search engines read, and Culinary Card reads that first, so they come through well. General sites that happen to have a recipe on the page usually work too.
What about Pinterest recipes?
Paste a pin URL (the shortened pin.it link from the app’s Share button works as well as the full pinterest.com/pin address) and Culinary Card follows it through to the source recipe and imports that. You can keep browsing on Pinterest and still end up with something searchable.
Should I keep the link to the original page?
It is worth keeping alongside the recipe. It credits the person who wrote it, and the comments on the original page often have useful fixes from people who cooked it. In Culinary Card a link import keeps the source for you; for pasted text you can fill in the Source field under Optional settings.
How much does it cost?
You get 9 free credits on signup. Saving a recipe from a URL uses 2 credits. A $10/year plan gives you 100 credits that roll over (up to 500 held at once).