Recipe Vault

🥘 Recipe Vault

Your recipes, in plain markdown or Cooklang, right inside Obsidian.

🌐 Visit the site  ·  📦 Install from the community directory

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Import recipes from the web, browse them in a visual gallery, and build shopping lists automatically. Paste a URL, get a clean recipe note, or a Cooklang file if you'd rather. No subscriptions, no accounts, no ads. Just your recipes in your vault.

Screenshots and a walkthrough of every feature: recipes.taylordugger.com.

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✨ Features

• 🌐 Import from any URL: fetches structured recipe data (JSON-LD) from a recipe page and creates a formatted note instantly.
• 📸 Add recipe from photo: photograph a cookbook page or recipe card (or pick image files) and let AI vision transcribe it into a recipe note, with a verify/edit step before saving. Works on desktop and mobile.
• ✍️ Add recipes manually: create a recipe note from scratch using the same template.
• 🍳 Cooklang support: open .cook files in a recipe view, or have every new recipe saved as Cooklang instead of markdown. The gallery, search and shopping list work with both. See Cooklang.
• 📦 Import and export files: turn JSON-LD (.json) and Cooklang (.cook) files into recipes one at a time or a whole folder at once, and export any recipe back out as either.
• 🖼️ Recipe gallery: browse your whole collection visually in a dedicated gallery view, markdown notes and .cook files together.
• 🔍 Search everything: filter as you type across titles, meal types, and ingredients, so you can find every recipe that uses what's already in the fridge.
• ⚖️ Shopping list: check off ingredients in a recipe and send them to a single shopping list file. Duplicates combine even when the recipes wrote them differently - "1 large onion" and "2 yellow onions, diced" come out as one row of three - and the list is sorted by aisle, so the produce is together.
• 🔁 Compare recipes: select multiple recipes and view them side by side, with shared and unique ingredients highlighted.
• 📅 Mark as made: track when you last made a recipe and how many times.
• 🤖 Ask AI for edits: request changes like "make this dairy-free" or "scale to 2 servings" via OpenRouter (API key required). Markdown notes only for now.
• 🎨 Customizable templates: full Handlebars support so your notes look exactly how you want.

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📥 Installation

From the Obsidian Community Plugins browser

1. Open Obsidian → Settings → Community plugins
2. Search for Recipe Vault
3. Click Install, then Enable

Manual installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into your vault at .obsidian/plugins/recipe-vault/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin under Settings → Community plugins.

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🚀 Quick Start

1. Click the chef hat icon in the ribbon (or run Import recipe from the command palette).
2. Paste a recipe URL and press Enter.
3. Your recipe note is created in the configured save folder. If Save new recipes as is set to Cooklang, you get a .cook file instead.

To browse your recipes, click the utensils icon in the ribbon to open the Recipe Gallery.

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⌨️ Commands

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⚙️ Settings

Gallery is empty but you've imported recipes? By default the gallery follows your Recipe save folder, so this shouldn't happen. If it does, you've set an explicit Recipe gallery folder that points somewhere other than where recipes are saved. Either clear that setting (blank = follow the save folder) or point it at your save folder, and your recipes will show up.

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📝 Custom Templates

Recipe Vault uses Handlebars for note templates. The plugin assumes the recipe page includes JSON-LD structured data.

Template file

You can edit the template in settings, or keep it as a note in your vault and point Template file at it. A file is easier to edit, it syncs with the rest of your vault, and the plugin never overwrites it.

To start one, click Create next to Template file. That writes your current template to Recipe Vault template.md in the vault root and selects it. You can move or rename it after, just update the setting. If the file goes missing, new recipes use the template in settings and you get a notice.

Some things to know:

• Keep it outside your recipe folder. The plugin skips the template file itself, but other plugins that list your recipes won't know to.
• Obsidian may flag the {{...}} values in the template's own properties as invalid. That only affects the template note, not the recipes made from it.
• If your template keeps the photo under a different property, like image_url, set Photo property to match. Otherwise the plugin adds a photo property to every new note so the gallery can find the image.

Built-in helpers

splitTags converts comma-separated tags into a YAML list for Obsidian frontmatter:

tags:
{{splitTags keywords}}

photoFrontmatter formats image values correctly for frontmatter (wikilink for local files, URL for remote):

photo: "{{photoFrontmatter image}}"

magicTime formats ISO durations and timestamps into readable values:

DateSaved:
{{magicTime}}
CookTime:
{{magicTime cookTime}}
TotalTime:
{{magicTime totalTime}}
DatePublished:
{{magicTime datePublished "dd-mm-yyyy"}}

Example output:

DateSaved: 2024-04-13 20:10
CookTime: 15m
TotalTime: 1h 5m

Default frontmatter fields

cssclasses: recipe-note
tags:
date_added:
meal_type:
author:
cook_time:
url:
photo:
times_made:
last_made:

If your template leaves out cssclasses, cook_time or the photo property, the plugin adds them to new notes. The gallery needs them. Your template itself is never changed.

Tip: Keep frontmatter starting at line 1 of your template. Obsidian requires this to parse it correctly.

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🍳 Cooklang

Cooklang is a plain-text recipe format. Instead of a separate ingredient list, ingredients are marked right in the steps:

---
title: Leek Soup
servings: 4
time: 45m
---

Melt @butter{2%tbsp} in a #large pot{} and soften @leeks{3}(sliced) for ~{10%minutes}.

Add @stock{1%l} and simmer for ~{20%minutes}.

Opening .cook files

Recipe Vault opens .cook files in their own view, laid out like a recipe note: an "At a Glance" box, the ingredients as a checkbox list, cookware, and the steps with ingredients, cookware and timers picked out. Your theme styles it the same as your notes.

• Mark as made and Add checked to shopping list work from the view, the same as from a note. Times made is saved in the file as times made and last made.
• Edit switches to a plain text editor over the file. The pencil in the view's header does the same.
• The photo at the top is the one named after the recipe and sitting next to it (Leek Soup.jpg beside Leek Soup.cook), which is where Cooklang keeps photos. Failing that, it's whatever the file's image: points at, a path in your vault or a URL.
• Another recipe used as an ingredient, like @./Sauces/Hollandaise{150%g}, is a link you can click. It's looked for next to the file, then in your recipe folder, then anywhere in the vault by name.
• Ticked ingredients reset when you close the file, since a .cook file has nowhere to keep them.

If you also have the Cooklang plugin installed, whichever plugin loads first opens .cook files. Recipe Vault leaves them alone if another plugin already has them.

Saving new recipes as Cooklang

Set Save new recipes as to Cooklang file and every new recipe is saved as a .cook file: URL imports, batch imports, photo imports, file and folder imports, and Add recipe (manual). Switch it back to Markdown and new recipes are notes again. Nothing you already have gets converted either way, and the gallery shows both.

Recipe pages keep the ingredients apart from the steps, and Cooklang marks them inside the steps, so an import has to match them up. Each ingredient is marked in the first step that mentions it. "1 yellow onion, diced" matches a step that says "the onions" and becomes @yellow onion{1}(diced). An ingredient no step mentions goes in a "Gather" step at the top so nothing is lost.

The photo goes in your image folder (see Save images) and the file's image: points at it. If the image folder is blank, it goes next to the file as Recipe Name.jpg instead.

Importing a .cook file while in Cooklang mode copies it as written, so its cookware and timers come along.

The gallery

.cook files show up in the gallery next to your notes, with their photo, meal type (course), cook time (time) and times made, and their ingredients are searchable. When a .cook file sits next to a note with the same name, which is what Export recipe as Cooklang file leaves behind, only the note shows.

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📦 Importing and exporting files

Recipe Vault can turn recipe files already in your vault into recipes:

• JSON-LD (.json): a schema.org Recipe, the same data recipe websites carry. One file can hold several recipes.
• Cooklang (.cook): see Cooklang.

Right-click a file and choose Import as recipe, or run Import recipe from JSON-LD or Cooklang file. Obsidian only shows .json files in the file explorer with Files and links → Detect all file extensions turned on.

To import a whole folder, right-click it and choose Import recipes from folder. Subfolders are kept, so Imports/Desserts/pie.json lands in Recipes/Desserts/. It's safe to run again: a recipe whose URL or source file is already in your vault is skipped. Files that can't be read are listed in an Import errors note in the folder you imported. A folder with 1,000 or more files asks first, since the gallery gets slow with thousands of recipes.

To go the other way, right-click a recipe and choose Export recipe as JSON-LD or Export recipe as Cooklang, or use the matching commands. The file is written next to the recipe. A .cook file can be exported as JSON-LD too. Times made comes along, so exporting and importing a recipe back doesn't reset it.

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🤖 Ask AI

Recipe Vault can use an AI model to suggest edits to a markdown recipe note directly in the note preview (for example, "make this dairy-free" or "scale to 2 servings"). This requires an OpenRouter API key, which you can add in plugin settings.

No OpenRouter key yet? Sign up free at openrouter.ai, then grab a key from openrouter.ai/keys. It's pay-as-you-go (no subscription), and the default model costs well under a cent per request. Paste the key into Recipe Vault settings → OpenRouter API key.

The default model is google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite. Any OpenRouter-compatible model ID can be used, and you can optionally override the built-in system prompt in settings.

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📸 Add Recipe from Photo

No cookbook page? No problem. Run Add recipe from photo from the command palette to turn a photographed cookbook page or recipe card into a note:

1. Capture: take a photo (camera opens automatically on mobile) or choose existing image files. Multiple photos are treated as pages of a single recipe, so multi-page cookbook spreads work in one go.
2. Verify: the vision model transcribes the name, ingredients, instructions, time, and yield; edit the result before saving to fix any misreads.
3. Photo: the captured photo is attached to the recipe by default, or choose a different image or none.

This uses the same OpenRouter API key and model as Ask AI, so no separate setup is required. There's no bundled OCR engine; the vision model does the transcription, so it works on mobile too.

From my testing each recipe import from a cookbook costs under $0.001 on average (using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite).

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🔒 Network use and privacy

Recipe Vault is primarily local, but it can make network requests for the following features:

• Recipe URL import: fetches the page you provide to read recipe JSON-LD data. The URL and page response are used only to create recipe notes in your vault.
• Proxy fallback (optional, off by default): if an import is blocked and you enable this setting, the recipe URL is retried once through a public read proxy (allorigins.win), which sends that URL to a third-party service.
• Recipe image download (optional): when enabled, recipe images referenced by imported recipes are downloaded into your vault. This includes the image URL in an imported JSON-LD file.
• Ask AI via OpenRouter (optional): sends your prompt plus recipe ingredients/instructions to OpenRouter to generate suggestions. Requests include your configured OpenRouter API key.
• Add recipe from photo via OpenRouter (optional): sends your captured/chosen photo(s) to OpenRouter for transcription. Requests include your configured OpenRouter API key.

No ads are shown, and no telemetry is collected by Recipe Vault itself.

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🏷️ Releasing

Releases are automated via GitHub Actions.

1. Go to Actions → Tag and Release
2. Click Run workflow and choose patch, minor, or major
3. Review the draft release and publish when ready

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🙏 Credits

Recipe Vault is based on obsidian-recipe-grabber by @seethroughdev, which provided the original URL import foundation. This project has since been substantially rewritten and extended with new features.

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📄 License

MIT