How-to
How to import a recipe from a website on iPhone
The short answer
On iPhone, use the Safari share sheet to send a recipe page straight to a recipe app, paste the page's URL into the app, or paste the recipe text itself if the page won't cooperate — most recipe sites publish machine-readable data that importers read directly.
The three ways to do this
Every recipe-import feature on iPhone boils down to one of three inputs: a shared page, a pasted link, or pasted text. Which one works depends on how the page is built, not on which app you’re using.
1. Share the page from Safari
- Open the recipe in Safari.
- Tap the share icon (the square with an arrow pointing up), in the toolbar or the address bar depending on your iOS version.
- Scroll the share sheet’s app row until you find your recipe app, and tap it. If it’s not there, tap More and turn it on — iOS hides new share extensions by default.
- The app opens with the page already queued for import. Confirm, and wait a few seconds while it reads the page.
This is the fastest route because you never leave the flow you’re already in — you found the recipe, you share it, you’re done. Sous Chef has a share extension for this: send a page to Sous Chef from Safari’s share sheet and it imports the same way.
2. Paste the link into the app
- Copy the recipe’s URL from Safari’s address bar.
- Open your recipe app and find its “import from a link” option.
- Paste the URL and start the import.
Functionally this is the same import as the share sheet — same parsing, same result — it’s just useful when the page is already closed, the link came from a text or an email, or the app’s share extension isn’t set up. Sous Chef supports importing from a link this way.
3. Paste the recipe text
- Select the ingredients and steps on the page (or copy them from a screenshot, a text, a group chat).
- Open your recipe app’s “paste text” or “paste recipe” option.
- Paste and confirm.
This is the fallback that works when the first two don’t — more on why below. Sous Chef also imports directly from one or more photos of a recipe, for when there’s no webpage at all, just a card, a cookbook, or a handwritten note. Video import isn’t supported yet in any of these apps’ typical feature set, including Sous Chef’s — if the only version of a recipe is inside a video, you’ll need to transcribe the ingredients and steps yourself before pasting them in.
What the importer is actually reading, and why some pages fail
Most recipe blogs and recipe sites publish their ingredients, steps, prep and cook time, and servings twice: once as the styled page you read, and once as plain machine-readable data embedded in the page’s code, following a shared vocabulary called schema.org’s Recipe type. It’s usually written as JSON-LD, a block of structured JSON sitting quietly in the page’s <head>, listing things like recipeIngredient, recipeInstructions, recipeYield, prepTime, and cookTime in a consistent format.
Sites do this for search, not for import tools — Google uses that same markup to show recipe cards, star ratings, and cook times directly in search results, which is worth real traffic to a food blog. But it’s a convenient side effect: any tool that wants to read a recipe automatically can look for the same structured block instead of trying to guess which paragraph on the page is an ingredient and which one is a story about a trip to Tuscany.
That’s why a link import can work in seconds on one site and fail outright on another — it’s reading data the page’s owner chose to publish, not understanding the page the way you do. When that data is missing, incomplete, or blocked, the importer has nothing reliable to parse. Here’s where that shows up in practice, and what to do about each one:
| What goes wrong | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Paywalled or login-walled page | The importer can’t load content that’s gated behind a subscription or account, even if you can see it | Copy the visible text and paste it in instead |
| Recipe is only in a video | There’s no structured data or even prose to read — the ingredients live in someone’s spoken narration | Pause the video and type out the ingredients and steps yourself, then paste the text |
| Recipe is only in a photo (cookbook, recipe card, screenshot of text) | No webpage, no structured data, nothing to fetch | Use photo import instead of a link — Sous Chef imports from one or more photos directly |
| Ingredients written as prose (“a couple cloves of garlic, minced, and a good glug of olive oil”) | There’s no ingredient list to parse at all, structured or otherwise | Paste the text; expect to double-check quantities afterward, since prose measurements are inherently approximate |
| Multi-recipe pages (“12 chicken dinners” roundups) | The page has no single Recipe block, or has several, and the importer can’t reliably guess which one you meant | Open the individual recipe’s own page (roundups usually link out to it) and import from there |
| Odd quantity formats (“1 can (14.5 oz)”, “1 stick butter”, “a pinch”) | These often import fine as text, but non-standard units are easy to misread when you later scale the recipe | Check the ingredient list right after import, before you scale or convert anything |
| No structured data at all (older sites, personal blogs, forum posts) | There’s nothing for the importer to find but a wall of HTML | Paste the visible recipe text — this is exactly the fallback path is for |
None of this means an importer is broken when it fails — it means the page didn’t hand over the one thing importers actually read. Be skeptical of any app that claims to work with any website; no importer parses every page on the internet, because not every page publishes the data that makes parsing possible. When a link import comes back empty, pasting the text is not a downgrade, it’s the correct move for that page.
What to check right after any import
An import that returns something is not the same as an import that returned the right thing. Before you start cooking, or before you scale or convert anything:
- Servings/yield. This is the number every later calculation depends on, and it’s one of the easier fields to get wrong when a page’s serving size is written unusually (“makes 2 dozen,” “serves 4-6”).
- Oven temperature. Check it’s actually in the ingredient or step text and not silently dropped — a missing temperature is one of the more consequential failures because you won’t notice until the food’s in the oven.
- Anything that looked like a note on the original page. Substitution tips, “if using a different pan” asides, and make-ahead instructions live outside the structured ingredient/step fields on a lot of sites, so they’re the most likely thing to get left behind.
A recipe that imports with a missing oven temperature and no visible error is worse than one that fails to import at all — you’ll find out at the wrong moment. Give the result thirty seconds before you start cooking from it.
Try it: import, then ask for a change
Import a recipe into Sous Chef using any of the three routes above. Once it’s in, instead of editing it by hand, just tell it what you want changed, in plain language — something like “make this vegetarian” or “I don’t have buttermilk, what should I use instead.”
Sous Chef turns that request into a structured patch, not a suggestion buried in a paragraph. If the substitution changes how a step is written — swapping buttermilk for milk and vinegar changes the mixing step, not just the ingredient line — the step updates too, and the changed lines are marked Edited. The original import stays intact underneath; edits apply to a working copy, and you can undo back to it. That’s the difference between an app that just stores what it imported and one that keeps working from it. For scaling servings up or down, see how to scale a recipe; for finding a stand-in for a specific ingredient, see how to substitute an ingredient.
Common questions
Why did my import come back with an image but no ingredients?
The page likely has an image and a name in its structured data (the two fields search engines actually require) but a thin or missing recipeIngredient list. Some sites populate the required fields for SEO and let the rest lag. Paste the visible ingredient text instead.
Can I import a recipe from a screenshot?
Yes, through photo import rather than a link import — a screenshot is an image, not a page an importer can fetch. Sous Chef imports from one or more photos directly.
Does importing from a link work with every recipe site?
No. It works with pages that publish structured recipe data, which is most active recipe blogs and recipe sites, but not paywalled pages, video-only recipes, or older pages with no markup at all. Be wary of any app that claims otherwise.
Will the imported recipe look exactly like the original page?
The structured fields (ingredients, steps, times, yield) should match closely. Formatting flourishes, sidebar tips, and anything the site treated as a “note” rather than a step are the parts most likely to be missing — check the result before you cook from it.
Does Sous Chef import video recipes?
Not yet. If the only version of a recipe is inside a video, transcribe the ingredients and steps yourself and use paste-text import instead.
Do I need an account to import a recipe?
No. Importing, editing, and cooking all work as a guest. Signing in exists so your library survives if you get a new phone — it’s not required to use any of the import routes above.
Try it on your own recipe
Sous Chef is free to download and try on iPhone. Heavier AI use may need a subscription later.
Download on the App Store