# How to save a recipe from a YouTube video Turn a YouTube cooking video into a written recipe with separated ingredients and steps. What works, what doesn't, and how to do it by hand if you'd rather. > https://forkandspoon.app/guides/save-recipes-from-youtube/ ยท bijgewerkt 2026-08-30 You found the video, the dish looked right, and two weeks later you're scrolling your watch history trying to remember whether it was 200 grams of flour or 300. Meanwhile the pan's already hot. A cooking video is a bad place to keep a recipe. There's no ingredient list you can scan, no amounts you can check at a glance, and no way to tick things off in a shop. This page covers getting the recipe out of the video and into something you can actually cook from. ## The short answer In Fork & Spoon: copy the video link, open the app, paste it into import. You get back a recipe with the ingredients, amounts and steps as separate fields, and you can edit it before saving. On a phone you can use the share sheet instead, which saves the copying. If you'd rather not use an app, skip to doing it by hand further down. It works, it just takes about ten minutes a recipe. ## What actually gets read This is the part most tools are vague about, and it explains why some videos import beautifully and others don't. Fork & Spoon looks at three things, in this order: 1. **The transcript.** If the video has captions, either the creator's own or the automatic ones, that's the richest source. It's got the amounts spoken out loud and the order things happen in. 2. **The description.** Plenty of cooking channels paste the full recipe underneath the video. When it's there it's often better than the transcript, because it's already written as a list. 3. **The title**, mostly to name the recipe. When there's both a transcript and a description, both go in. That redundancy is what catches the case where the creator says "a good glug of olive oil" out loud but wrote "3 tbsp" underneath. ## When a video has no captions Automatic captions aren't available on every video. Creators can switch them off, and they're sometimes missing on very new or very old uploads. With no transcript at all, the import falls back to the title and description. If the description hasn't got a recipe in it either, Fork & Spoon stops rather than guessing. That's deliberate. A recipe invented from a title is worse than no recipe, because it looks plausible enough to cook from. You'll get a message saying there wasn't enough to work with, instead of a made-up ingredient list. ## What you get back A recipe, not a transcript. Specifically: - **Ingredients as separate rows**, each with an amount and a unit, so the servings can be scaled and the whole lot can go to a shopping list. - **Steps in order**, cleaned of "hit that subscribe button" and the two minutes about the sponsor. - **A link back to the video**, kept with the recipe so you can rewatch the tricky bit. - **Title, cuisine and rough timings** where they can be worked out. Everything's editable before you save. In practice the thing most worth checking is oven temperatures and pan sizes, which are the details creators tend to say once, quickly, halfway through a sentence. ## Videos this works badly on Being straight about the limits: - **No captions and a one-line description.** There's nothing to read. This is the main failure case. - **Recipes told entirely through on-screen text.** Text burned into the video frames isn't in the transcript, so it doesn't come through. - **Compilations.** "Five pasta dinners" gives you a jumble rather than five clean recipes. Import the individual videos if the creator posted them separately. - **A language you haven't got set.** The recipe comes back in your app language, but a transcript that doesn't exist in the first place can't be read at all. ## Three things people assume don't work **An iPhone and an Android phone, in the same kitchen.** A shared cookbook, week menu and shopping list all work across both at once. One of you ticking off tomatoes shows up on the other's phone straight away, whichever phone that is. **A browser, with nothing installed.** The same account opens at app.forkandspoon.app on a laptop, a work computer or a Windows machine. Pasting a batch of video links is much quicker on a keyboard, and the recipes are on your phone by the time you're in the kitchen. **Sending a recipe to someone who's never heard of the app.** Any recipe goes out as a link that opens as an ordinary web page, with the ingredients, amounts, steps and photo. No install, no account, no sign-up wall. ## Doing it by hand If you don't want another app, this works and costs nothing: 1. Open the video description and click "more". Copy anything that looks like an ingredient list. 2. Open the transcript: the three dots under the video, then "Show transcript". Copy the section where the cooking happens. 3. Paste both into a notes app and clean it up, one ingredient per line with amounts in front. 4. Add the video URL at the top so you can find it again. The tedious part is step three, and it's the same tedious part every time, which is why it usually doesn't happen and the recipe stays lost in the watch history. ## Where the recipe lives after this Getting it out of the video only helps if it lands somewhere you'll look. In Fork & Spoon an imported recipe behaves like any other: it goes into your cookbook, you can put it on a day in the week menu, and its ingredients flow into the shopping list grouped by supermarket aisle. That's the actual point. The video was never the problem. The problem was that nothing connected it to the moment you're standing in a shop wondering what you needed. ## Questions **Does the video need subtitles for this to work?** It helps a lot but is not required. Fork & Spoon reads the transcript when there is one, and falls back to the title and description when there is not. Many cooking channels put the full recipe in the description, so those videos import fine without captions. **Can I save a recipe from a YouTube Short?** Yes, the same way as a normal video. Shorts are less likely to have captions and the description is usually shorter, so the result depends more on what the creator wrote underneath. **Does the creator still get the view?** Yes. Fork & Spoon saves the recipe text for your own use and keeps a link back to the video, which stays in the saved recipe. **Is this free?** Saving, editing and cooking recipes is free. Importing from a video is part of Premium, EUR 4.99 per month or EUR 49.99 per year. **My partner has an Android phone and I have an iPhone. Does that work?** Yes. A shared cookbook works across both, and so does the shared shopping list. Accounts are not tied to an ecosystem, and there is also a browser version at app.forkandspoon.app if one of you would rather not install anything.