Everyone has the same routine. Find a promising recipe, scroll past the story, past the ad that reflows the page as you reach it, past the second ad, past "jump to recipe" that jumps to the wrong place, and finally reach a list of ingredients you then have to remember while you shop.
Bookmarking it doesn't fix any of that. You'll have to run the same gauntlet next time, assuming the page still exists.
Why bookmarks are a bad place for recipes
- Links rot. Blogs get abandoned, domains lapse, sites get redesigned and old URLs stop resolving. A bookmark is a pointer to someone else's server, and you have no say in how long it lives.
- Recipes get changed or removed. Writers revise quantities, put older posts behind a paywall, or delete them outright. The version you liked isn't guaranteed to be the version you find.
- You can't shop from a bookmark. There's no ingredient list you can turn into a shopping list, which is the one thing you actually need it for.
- They don't survive a phone. Bookmarks scattered across Safari, Chrome, screenshots and a Notes file aren't a cookbook.
Option 1: send the page to a recipe app
Masterplan reads the page and keeps the recipe — title, ingredients, method, times — and throws away the story and the ads.
- Open the recipe in Safari (or Chrome — any browser with a share button).
- Tap the share icon.
- Choose Masterplan. The first time, tap More and switch it on.
- Carry on reading. The recipe is saved in the background.
Or just copy the link
If someone sends you a recipe in a message, you don't need the share sheet at all. Copy the link, open Masterplan, and it'll notice the URL on your clipboard and offer to import it. It's the fastest route when the link arrives somewhere other than a browser.
Either way, what you get back is:
- Title, ingredients with amounts, and numbered steps
- Prep and cook time, and how many it serves
- The recipe photo
- A link back to the original page, so you can credit or revisit it
And then the useful part: the ingredients can go onto a grocery list grouped by aisle, or into a meal plan for a particular night. You can also scale the servings, and the amounts adjust with it.
Masterplan is free for 20 imports a month. Nutrition information is part of the paid Edition tier.
Pinterest pins
A pin is usually just a picture pointing at a real recipe somewhere else. Share the pin and Masterplan follows it through to the page it came from and imports that — so you get the actual recipe rather than the pin's caption. Worth knowing if your recipe collection currently lives on a Pinterest board.
When a site won't import
Most recipe sites work, including ones that load their content dynamically. A few won't, and it's worth knowing why rather than assuming something is broken:
- Paywalled or login-only recipes. If you have to be signed in to read it, an importer can't reach it either.
- Recipes that are only an image. Some sites publish a photo of a recipe card with no text on the page. Nothing to read means nothing to extract — but you can screenshot it and use photo import instead.
- Pages that aren't really recipes. A roundup post of "30 autumn dinners" has thirty partial recipes and no single one to import. Open the individual recipe first, then share that.
Option 2: do it without an app
These all work, and each has a real drawback worth knowing:
- Reader mode. In Safari, tap the page-settings icon in the address bar and choose Show Reader. It strips the ads and most of the clutter. It doesn't save anything, so you'll do it again next time.
- Print to PDF. Share → Print, then pinch out on the preview and save the PDF to Files. You get a permanent copy that survives the site disappearing — but it isn't searchable by ingredient and you can't shop from it.
- Copy and paste into notes. The most flexible and the most tedious. Fine for a recipe you'll cook for years, painful as a routine.
If you only rescue the occasional recipe, print-to-PDF is genuinely underrated — it solves link rot, which is the failure most people don't see coming.
Common questions
Does it work on any recipe site?
Most of them, including sites that build their pages dynamically. The exceptions are pages you can't read without logging in, and pages where the recipe is only an image.
Does it keep the whole blog post?
No — deliberately. You get the recipe, not the preamble, plus a link back to the original if you want to read it. If there's a detail in the post worth keeping, add it to your own notes on the recipe.
What if the import gets something wrong?
Edit it. Every imported recipe is fully editable, and sites vary enough in how they mark up ingredients that the occasional odd quantity is worth a quick glance before you shop.
Is the original site credited?
Yes — the saved recipe keeps a link back to the page it came from. Imported recipes are for your own personal use, the same as writing one out by hand.
Keep the recipe, lose the life story
Save one from any site in a couple of taps. Free on iPhone.
