Get the recipe out of a YouTube video

A recipe you spot on YouTube has one flaw: it stays locked inside the video. With Cookfolio, paste the link and within a minute or two you get a real recipe card, with its ingredients, quantities and steps, ready to check over and keep in your collection. It works with public videos under 30 minutes, Shorts included.

Why YouTube recipes get lost so easily

On YouTube, a recipe is said more than it is written. Quantities are spoken out loud, sometimes only shown with a pour, and they go by faster than you can write them down. So you pause, rewind, pause again, and end up with notes scribbled on the back of a receipt.

A few weeks later, the video is still somewhere in your history. But to find out how much flour went in, you have to watch the whole thing again.

Import a YouTube recipe in four steps

1. Copy the video link from YouTube.
2. In Cookfolio, tap ”+”, then choose “Import from a link”.
3. Paste the link and wait a minute or two.
4. Check the suggested recipe, fix anything that needs it, then save.

Cookfolio follows the video from start to finish: what the cook says, what they show and what appears on screen. So the recipe doesn’t need to be written down anywhere. The video thumbnail is offered as the recipe photo, and you can keep it or swap in your own.

Nothing is saved without you: the recipe always goes through a review screen, where every ingredient and every step can be edited.

A recipe in your language and your units

The recipe arrives in the language of your app, whatever the language of the video. An Italian or Spanish video gives you a recipe card in English.

Quantities stay as the video gives them, and the display adapts to you. With the US setting, the grams of a French channel read in ounces and a 180 °C oven reads 350 °F. With the Metric setting, it works the other way: cups read in millilitres and 350 °F reads 180 °C, on the recipe page and in cooking mode alike. A cup never turns into grams, because its weight depends on what is in it. Our guide to US or metric units for your recipes explains the setting, and the article on cups to grams gives the weights ingredient by ingredient.

The videos that import best

Some videos give an almost perfect recipe card on the first try. They have this in common:

• quantities said out loud, rather than poured in silence,
• an ingredient list shown on screen, at the start or as a caption,
• a single recipe, followed from start to finish.

Silent videos set to music and compilations of several recipes, on the other hand, give less complete cards.

A good habit: many channels also publish their recipes on a blog. If the video description links to a website, paste that link instead, and the import will be even faster and more precise.

What to check before saving

Cookfolio doesn’t make anything up: when the video leaves out a piece of information, the field stays empty rather than being filled with a guess. So four things deserve a quick look.

Quantities said very fast. That is where wrong numbers slip in. Check them one by one.

Ingredients shown but never named. An amber liquid poured without a word could be honey or maple syrup. Fill it in if needed.

Quantities without a number. A pinch of salt added without measuring stays without a quantity. Add a number so that adjusting the servings takes it into account.

Servings and temperatures. Fill in the number of servings if it is missing, since it is the basis for recalculating quantities. For temperatures, just check that the unit noted, °C or °F, matches the video.

Once the recipe is saved

Your YouTube recipe becomes a card like any other in your collection. Cooking mode shows one step at a time, in large type, keeps the screen on and turns durations into timers ready to start. Add the recipe to your weekly meal plan, and the shopping list is built from the planned meals.

With the Family plan, your whole household shares the same recipes, meal plan and shopping list, with up to four accounts. Our guide to setting up Cookfolio Family explains how to invite the people you share your kitchen with.

Cookfolio also imports your recipes from TikTok, Instagram, a blog, a photo or a PDF: our article on AI import covers them all. Your first 5 imports are free, enough to try it with your favourite videos.