How to save a recipe from a TikTok

TikTok is very good at making you want to cook something and very bad at letting you cook it. The video's forty seconds long, the amounts flash past in a jump cut, and the favourites tab is an unsearchable wall of thumbnails.

The short answer

Open the video, tap Share, choose Fork & Spoon. Or copy the link and paste it into the app's import screen. The caption gets read and you get back a recipe with ingredients, amounts and steps as separate, editable fields.

Why the caption, not the audio

Fork & Spoon reads the caption of a TikTok rather than the spoken voice-over.

On TikTok specifically that's usually an advantage. The audio track is frequently a trending sound rather than the creator talking, and even when they are talking, forty seconds doesn't leave room to say "180 grams of plain flour" out loud. Creators who want people to actually make the dish put the amounts in the caption, because that's the only place they fit.

Where it doesn't work: recipes shown purely as text overlaid on the video frames, with a caption that just says "recipe". Nothing readable exists outside the video, so nothing can be imported. Screenshot the frame with the ingredient list and use photo import instead, since reading text out of an image is a different path in the app and it handles that fine.

When there isn't enough

If the caption is short and has no quantities in it, the import stops and says so rather than producing something.

That refusal is the feature. A model handed "the only pasta recipe you need" will write you a pasta recipe. It'll look right. It'll have nothing to do with the video. Being told there isn't enough costs you five seconds; finding out at the stove costs you dinner.

What you get back

• Ingredients as separate rows with amounts, ready to scale or send to a shopping list
• Steps in order, minus the hashtags
• A link back to the original video
• The title, plus cuisine and timings where they're stated

Everything's editable before saving. Worth checking on TikTok imports especially: pan sizes and oven temperatures, which are the details most likely to be cut for time.

Once it's out of TikTok

It opens in a browser too. app.forkandspoon.app, same account, nothing installed. Handy for the evening you want to plan a fortnight of cooking on a proper keyboard instead of a phone.

iPhone and Android, together. Share a cookbook with whoever you cook with, regardless of which phone either of you carries. Same recipes, same week menu, same shopping list, updating live while one of you is in the shop.

And you can send one recipe to anyone. A link that opens as a plain web page in any browser, with no app, no account and no download prompt. Considerably easier than telling someone to find the video, expand the caption and squint.

Doing it by hand

1. Tap Share, then Copy link.
2. Tap the caption to expand it and copy the text.
3. Paste into a notes app, then rewrite it as one ingredient per line with the amount in front, followed by the steps.
4. Keep the link at the top so you can rewatch the technique.

Five minutes a recipe, every recipe, forever. Which is why the favourites tab has four hundred videos in it and you've cooked two of them.

Why bother getting it out

A favourited video is borrowed, not kept. Creators delete things, accounts go private, videos get pulled over the audio rights. When that happens the video vanishes from your favourites with no notice and no copy.

Once the recipe's in your own cookbook you can put it on a Tuesday in the week menu, let its ingredients flow into a shopping list sorted by aisle, and send it to whoever's cooking as a link that opens in any browser. The forty-second video did its job. It made you want the dish. It just shouldn't be the only place the dish exists.