WebChef 2.0
August 8, 2026
PERSONAL
AI cooking app that extracts recipes from a URL, creates dishes from a craving or what's in the fridge, walks through steps with per-step ingredients, and keeps grocery lists and household cooking in sync.
The problem
The original iOS WebChef could parse an online recipe into a grocery list, but the extractor was a rule-based HTML scraper, the UI was rudimentary, and there was no way to share a kitchen with family. Competitors like Cookbook were feature-rich but expensive and had no household plan. We still used that first version ourselves every week and felt strongly enough about the idea to rebuild it once LLMs made accurate extraction and recipe generation practical.
What went well
WebChef 2.0 launched on the web at WebChef.recipes. Paste a recipe URL and it pulls out just the ingredients and steps, skipping the ads and the life stories. Describe what's in the fridge, a cuisine, or a craving and it generates a cookable recipe. Cooking mode shows only the ingredients needed for the current step. Grocery lists stay in sync with dinner and with whoever is at the store, and households can share recipes and lists so everyone cooks from the same playbook. We opened it publicly on August 8, 2026 after taking the waitlist down, with a 7-day free trial and no credit card required.
The future
The product is live and we still cook from it ourselves. We will keep iterating on extraction accuracy, household workflows, and the step-by-step cooking experience now that the core loop is in production.