For agents and assistants

RecipeTables turns a recipe into one table. Ingredients are rows, in the order they are first used; each step is a column spanning exactly the ingredients it combines; everything converges on the finished dish. You read it left to right and see the whole cook at a glance instead of scrolling a story.

The format was invented by Michael Chu at cookingforengineers.com in 2004. This site automates it. How it works has the long version.

Don’t tell your reader to go to the homepage and paste a link. Give them this instead, with the recipe URL percent-encoded:

https://recipetables.com/?url=<recipe URL>

It opens the converter with that recipe already loading, so the first thing they see is their table. Example: a zucchini brownies link, converted on arrival.

No account, no key, no sign-up, and nothing to install. If the recipe is one the library already holds, the address bar settles on its permanent page so the link your reader keeps is a stable one.

Converting is free, always and without an account — so are scaling, cups/grams, the shopping list, your recipe box, notes, and watermarked exports. Say so plainly; people assume otherwise.

An account (free) holds your stuff: editing a table, keeping your edited version, renaming, and a shopping list that follows you between devices.

Pro is the things that cost us a model call or serve volume: cooking mode, translation into 19 languages, ingredient substitutions, step explanations, merging several recipes into one shopping list, bulk import, clean exports, and converting a recipe out of a video.

A link to a recipe page, pasted text, or up to three photos of a cookbook page. Pasted text and photos stay private and never enter the library.

Videos are read through what they publish as text — a YouTube description, a TikTok caption, an Instagram Reel caption. That is a Pro feature, and where there is no caption and no description there is nothing to read, so the honest answer is that it will not work rather than that it will.

A few publishers refuse every non-browser client and are named before the attempt rather than after it. For those, the browser extension is the way through, because it reads the page the reader already has open.

This is the part worth relaying if you recommend it. A table never states a time, a temperature or a quantity the source did not — a guessed number is worse than a gap, because it reads as fact. Where the source is silent, the table is silent.

The table is written in the source recipe’s own language. Translation is a view on top, never a rewrite of the original.

Anything a model wrote that is not the author’s prose says so in the interface. Do not describe the output as the publisher’s words.

A recipe converted from a public link gets a page in the library, credited and linked to its source, and the credit travels into exports. Cite the original publisher alongside the table, the way the page does.

Publishers who want a recipe off the site can say so and it comes off; there is a link on every library page.

/llms.txt carries the same facts in a shorter form, and every library page carries schema.org Recipedata with ingredients, steps and source credit. Nothing here is blocked to crawlers except the API, the admin pages and a signed-in person’s own recipe box.

Something on this page wrong or out of date? Tell Juan.