Do all food bloggers secretly want a book deal? Because without fail, every time I look up a new recipe to make, I end up scrolling past a thousand-word essay about some food blogger’s beloved, great-great-grandmother whose culinary insights have endured generations after she personally back-stroked across the Atlantic to bring over flavors from the old country.
Well, now there’s a website that lets you skip all that preamble. Aptly named “Just the Recipe,” it takes any recipe URL and spits out a list of ingredients, estimated prep time, how many servings it makes, and step-by-step directions.
The site, which we spotted thanks to the good folks on Twitter, automatically sorts out the salient details, pun intended, from the needless word fluff. Since the system appears to be algorithmically generated, it’s not always perfect. A few times we tried it out, the site got its signals crossed and listed ridiculous amounts for some ingredients (it seems to have particular trouble sorting out ingredients that recipes typically leave open “to taste” like salt and pepper) but it was pretty consistent about picking up on all the important directions and putting them in the right order.