Videos in. Recipe out.
Cooking from a recipe video is a strange experience. Someone makes it
look effortless in sixty seconds, and then you're standing in your
kitchen with one hand covered in oil, scrubbing back through the reel
for the third time trying to catch how much butter went in.
The recipe is in there. It's just locked inside a format built for
watching, not for cooking.
ActuallyCook unlocks it. Paste a link — or share a video straight
from the app you're already in — and you get a real recipe back.
Ingredients with actual amounts. Steps in the order you do them.
Something you can follow while your hands are busy.
Who it's for
Anyone who saves recipe videos and then never cooks them.
That's most people who save recipe videos. The saving feels productive;
the cooking never happens, because the gap between watching and
doing is wider than it looks. You need a shopping list. You need to
know if you own the ingredients. You need to not lose your place at
step four.
ActuallyCook closes that gap:
- Save it once, cook it later. Your recipes stay in one place instead
of buried in a folder of saved posts. - Shop without thinking. The ingredient list goes straight to your
Reminders, so it's already waiting when you're at the store. - Cook without touching your phone. Timers live on the Lock Screen
and in the Dynamic Island — glanceable, not something you unlock for. - Queue a few at once. Send several videos, get on with your day, and
they'll be ready when you come back.
Why I built it
I kept saving videos I never cooked. Every time I did try, the same
friction: rewinding to catch a measurement, guessing at quantities the
video never said out loud, realising halfway through that I was missing
something I could have bought that morning.
It seemed like a solvable problem, and nobody had solved it in a way
that felt good to use. Most attempts either dump a wall of transcript
text on you or wrap the whole thing in an interface designed for
someone sitting at a desk — not someone standing over a hot pan.
Design
The whole product is built around one constraint: you are cooking.
Your hands are dirty. Your attention is split. You're glancing at the
screen for two seconds at a time, from a metre away. Every decision
follows from that — the size of the type, how much lives on one screen,
why timers surface outside the app instead of inside it, why the
ingredient list is a checklist and not a paragraph.
It's also meant to feel warm rather than clinical. Cooking is a good
part of the day, and a tool for it shouldn't look like a spreadsheet.
The interface stays out of the way and lets the food be the thing you're
looking at.
Scope
A solo project — product, design, engineering, and the App Store release.
Building and shipping something end to end, alone, is where I learned the
most about what to build, what to cut, and what people actually do with
a product once it's in their hands.