Frequently asked questions
Quick answers about how Mintdish parses recipes, what you can paste, and how to join the beta.
- What is Mintdish?
- Mintdish takes a recipe from wherever you found it — a link, a YouTube video, or a photo — and turns it into a clean, structured recipe with ingredients, prep steps, and timing. No food-blog backstory.
- What can I paste into Mintdish?
- Links from recipe sites like Bon Appétit, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking, and Food52; YouTube cooking videos; and photos or screenshots of cookbook pages, handwritten cards, or recipes a friend sent over text.
- Does Mintdish work with YouTube videos?
- Yes. Mintdish reads the video transcript and watches what's being cooked, then turns it into step-by-step instructions with ingredients. Each step links back to the timestamp so you can jump to that moment in the video.
- How accurate is the recipe parsing?
- Mintdish uses Google Gemini and recipe sites' structured metadata when available. Parsing is usually accurate for mainstream recipes; for handwritten cards or unusual sources, you can re-parse or tweak the result.
- Is Mintdish free?
- Yes — Mintdish is free during the beta. We may introduce paid tiers later for heavy use, but the core recipe parser will remain free.
- Do I need an account?
- Yes. You sign in with Google so your recipes are saved and synced across devices.
- How do I get access?
- Mintdish is invite-only while we tune the parser. Drop your email on the waitlist on the home page and we'll let you in as we open up access.
- Can I share a parsed recipe with someone else?
- Yes. From any recipe you can send a snapshot to someone by email — they'll receive the parsed ingredients, steps, and timing.
- What languages does Mintdish support?
- The Mintdish interface is available in English and Romanian. The parser itself handles recipes from sources in many languages.
- Where is my data stored?
- Recipes and account information are stored in a Postgres database hosted on Neon; images are stored on Vercel. Full details, including third parties involved in parsing and analytics, are listed in the Privacy Policy.