Recipe Cookbook App That Builds Itself From Videos You Saved

Rose · 19 September 2026

A recipe cookbook app is meant to be the place your recipes live, in one searchable book instead of scattered across screenshots and bookmarks. Yumzi reads the recipe out of the cooking videos you save on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and from recipe websites too, so the book fills itself instead of asking you to type each one in.

What should a recipe cookbook app do?

Hold recipes in a consistent shape, so every entry has ingredients with amounts and steps in order rather than a link and a thumbnail.

Let you find one again. A cookbook you can only scroll is a pile.

Let you edit. Recipes change once you have cooked them twice.

The shape is the hard part. A saved link is not a recipe, it is a pointer to one, and a screenshot of an ingredient card is an image your phone cannot search.

This is why import route matters more than library size. Samsung Food’s five documented import paths are four link-or-typing routes plus a camera scan of a written recipe, so a cookbook built on them fills up only as fast as you can find written sources.

How does Yumzi fill the cookbook?

From the videos, not from a library you browse. It transcribes the spoken track and reads the text that appears on screen, then writes out ingredients with amounts and steps in order, attributed to the creator who made the dish.

That covers the case most cookbook apps leave open: a reel with no caption, where the amounts were only ever said out loud.

Anything it is not confident about is flagged rather than presented as settled, so you can check that one line against the footage before you shop, rather than discovering it at the hob.

Can you add recipes that are not videos?

Yes, if it is a recipe website: paste the link and it reads the page directly. Recipes you type in yourself stay yours and are never overwritten by a later read.

What are the honest limits?

Yumzi never invents a recipe. A music-only montage with no spoken amounts and no on-screen text has no recipe in it to read, and you get told that rather than handed a plausible-looking guess.

Yumzi is free while it is in early access. Reading a recipe out of a video is the part that costs money to run, so a paid tier for heavy use is planned. The recipes you have saved, planning your week and the shopping list stay free.

The Albert Heijn basket hand-off is the Netherlands only, though the app itself is available in 175 countries.

Who should use something else?

If your recipes are mostly on food blogs, a URL clipper like Paprika is the better cookbook, because a web page already carries the recipe in text and a clipper is the right tool for that. Yumzi is the better cookbook when the recipes you care about are locked in video.