Recipe apps

03 Feb, 2026

I love taking recipe notes. But which system to use?

I'm a big fan of using some sort of personal notes system for recipes, primarily for three reasons:

First, I want a place to keep track of recipes I’ve made for posterity, especially the ones that turned out particularly well or crappy.

Second, I loathe reading recipes on the web. The lengthy, “This recipe reminds me of summers at grandma’s house...” backstories used to drive me nuts, but most sites now seem to have a Jump to recipe button so I can blow past all that. What I can’t stand are all the ads. They’re so intrusive and noisy and processor-hoggy.

Third, I like to annotate my recipes. Usually something in the recipe needs adjusting, I find conflicting advice in different recipes, or I want to keep track of my experiments in temperature, cook time, seasoning, or whatever. Over time, my recipe notes tend to start like this:

# Air Fried Salmon

- Tried 425° for 10m with a larger fillet but was still underdone at 120°. Trying 4 more minutes. Perfect!
- 425° for 7m wasn't enough for small fillet.
- ...

[actual recipe(s) down here]

So, the first thing I do when trying a new recipe is copy the pertinent details into Obsidian. I tag the note with something like #recipe, #recipe/dinner, or #recipe/mexican so it feeds my recipe Base. This takes a few minutes, but it builds my recipe library and grants me serenity during the cook.

Which system?

I used Paprika for a while after a friend recommended it. It was great. And I just saw that Mela, from the creator of Reeder, is now getting lots of love. These apps are cool and tempting. They auto-scrape recipes from the web, manage cooking timers for each step, can scale recipes up and down, and do lots more.

I was feeling the lure of these shiny things this morning and decided to write this post as a way of coming to a principled decision: should I stick with Obsidian or dive into one of these other apps?

My next step was to see if I’d written down any thoughts when I moved from Paprika back to Obsidian. Fortunately, I did. (I love it when I remember to do that!) Here are those verbatim notes:

Paprika's UI quirks keep buggin.

- I can't hit Cmd-N to quickly create a new recipe unless I'm on the home screen.
- I have to log into my recipe accounts in the embedded browser.
- I can't link between recipes easily or reliably.
- Categories feel clumsy compared to tags.

For example: I want a "meta" recipe for Tri-Tip (or whatever)
where I can capture summary notes and then link to the actual 
recipes. Easy in Obsidian, but not in Paprika.

None of these are indictments of Paprika. Rather, they’re reminders that I tend to gravitate toward plain text. I’m not dogmatic about it like some folks seem to be — I’m using Day One for journaling and Things for tasks, for example. But for my general-purpose note taking, plain text shines. It offers a tasty cocktail of control, flexibility, low cognitive load, and fun.

Here’s an example of why I like the flexibility of plain text. In Mela, the Notes section appears down below the recipe. I prefer to keep my annotations at the very top, so the first thing I see are hints like, “Bland, use more spice,“ or, “I thought it was great but the kids hated it.”

Of course, I could learn to be fast at Paprika, and I could learn to scroll to the Notes section in Mela first thing (or just keep my notes in the description field up top). But once I start thinking about making a time and effort investment, I start worrying about lock-in, which steers me back to plain text.

(In fairness to Paprika and Mela, they both have export options. But in either case, exporting back to Obsidian would be a project.)

With all that in mind, here’s my attempt at a principled decision:

• For note-taking use cases, I default to plain text for control, flexibility, longevity, and fun. This default is based on years of trying other things and ultimately coming back to Markdown in Obsidian.
• For recipes specifically, I don’t yet see a compelling reason to flout that default in favor of a recipe app.
  • Regarding auto-scraping: Copying and pasting from the web into Markdown works pretty well. I'm fast enough at it, and it gives me confidence I'm getting every little bit of relevant info. With an auto-scraper, I feel I have to double-check its work.
  • Regarding scaling recipes / ingredients: I don't mind doing that math in my head. And it's probably good exercise for my brains.
  • Regarding timers: My phone works just fine for that.
  • Meanwhile, Obsidian allows for great organization, search, metadata management (for tracking my own ratings of recipes, for example), cross-linking, sync, backup, and so on.
• And thus it was proclaimed: I’m sticking with Obsidian for recipes.

I have no idea if any of these words will be valuable for anyone else, but they were for me!

A note on Cooklang

Cooklang is plain-text markup language specifically for recipes. I took a look, but it’s not quite for me. A criticism I saw, which I think I agree with, is that it enables machine parseability at the cost of human readability.

For example:

Crack the @eggs{3} into a #blender, then add the @plain flour{125%g},
@milk{250%ml} and @sea salt{1%pinch}, and blitz until smooth.

There’s no list of ingredients up top. Instead, the ingredients are written inline with the instructions. The parser can find all the ingredients and generate a list just fine. That’s cool. But it’s harder for me the human to read just the plain text and know what all the ingredients are.

Plus, while there's some cool tooling built around Cooklang, I don’t really want to bother managing any of it.

Cooklang is a cool idea, but the value payoff isn’t quite there for the complexity cost.