Cooklook
Recipes without the ad-heavy blog. A native iOS app for keeping the recipes you love in cookbooks you design, finding new ones picked for how you eat, and cooking up to four dishes at once.
- Role
- Product, design, iOS, backend
- Platform
- iOS
- Stack
- SwiftUI, Supabase, PostgreSQL
- Status
- In development
The problem
Cooklook started with a simple frustration: looking up a recipe shouldn't be the hardest part of cooking.
Every recipe site is formatted differently, and the actual recipe is buried under ads and life stories. That's annoying at a desk and worse at the stove, when you're scrolling with messy hands. If you eat a certain way or have allergies, it's harder still. Search results don't know you're gluten-free or can't have peanuts, so you end up checking every ingredient yourself.
A full meal makes all of it worse: three recipes, three tabs, three timers, and no idea which one just went off.
What we built
A recipe platform with one rule: every recipe follows the same clean format, and nothing in a recipe or in cook mode will ever carry ads.
- Bookshelf
- Your recipes live in cookbooks with covers you design.
- For you
- A feed ranked by a short taste quiz, with diet and allergy filters, plus a Watch tab of short cooking videos, each linked to its recipe.
- Cook mode
- A prep checklist, then one step per screen, timers with alerts, and a screen that stays awake.
- Let's cook
- A queue of what you want to make, plus Cook now, which asks at most three questions and picks a meal, sides included.
- Composer
- It links each ingredient to the steps that use it and catches anything missing as you type.
Decisions that matter
Cook four dishes at once.
Real meals aren't one recipe. Cook mode runs up to four dishes in a split screen or a 2x2 grid, each with its own steps and timers.
Timers belong to the kitchen, not the screen, so they keep running when you switch dishes. When one goes off, it names its dish, and tapping it takes you straight there without losing your place.
Ingredients where you need them.
Each step shows only the ingredients it uses, with amounts, so you never scroll back up to the list mid-step.
Unknown is never safe.
If a recipe includes an ingredient the app doesn't recognize, it can't be checked for allergens. So the recipe is hidden from anyone with an allergy filter, the page says which ingredient couldn't be checked, and it can't be labeled gluten-free or dairy-free.
The video feed runs the same check, so it can't become a side door around someone's filters. Diet and allergy info is private by default and only ever used to filter your own feed.
Built to grow past the iPhone.
The core rules, like ingredient search, publish checks, pairings, and Cook now's picks, live in the database, not the app. A web or Android version only needs new screens, not a rewrite.
The app runs the same checks as you type for instant feedback, and the database checks again before anything publishes.
Where it stands
Working today
Accounts and the taste quiz, the ranked feed, the Watch video feed, recipe pages with serving scaling, the bookshelf, the composer, cook mode, and Cook now.
Next
Search and following, importing recipes from a link, and public web pages for shared recipes.
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