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.
- Why does Mintdish put prep steps before cooking steps?
- Real cooking is faster and calmer when everything is chopped, measured, and ready before the heat is on. Mintdish reorders any recipe into prep-first format — every chop, dice, marinade, or rest happens before the cooking starts, and each cooking step lists only the ingredients needed at that moment.
- Does Mintdish convert cups and ounces to grams?
- Yes. Every parsed recipe is converted to metric: cups, ounces, tablespoons, sticks of butter, and pints become grams and millilitres. The conversions are ingredient-aware (a cup of flour and a cup of water do not weigh the same), so the numbers are usable, not just multiplied.
- Can I parse a recipe from a photo of a cookbook page?
- Yes. Take a photo of a cookbook page, a handwritten recipe card, or a screenshot from a chat — Mintdish reads the image with Gemini vision, structures it, and uses the original photo as the recipe's hero image. Photos are stored privately and only served back to you through an authenticated proxy.
- Are AI-generated recipe images labelled?
- Yes. Any hero image generated on-demand by Mintdish using Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is watermarked with a small "Generated with AI" label so it can never be confused with a real photo.
- Which recipe sites does Mintdish work with?
- Mintdish works with most modern recipe blogs and cooking sites — Bon Appétit, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking, Food52, BBC Good Food, Smitten Kitchen, and many smaller blogs. If a site uses standard Recipe schema or has a readable recipe block, Mintdish will parse it.
- Can I scale a recipe to a different number of servings?
- Yes. Each saved recipe has a serving count you can change, and Mintdish rescales every quantity in the ingredient list and per-step ingredients to match. The original recipe is always one click away if you want to compare.
- Can I edit a parsed recipe after Mintdish creates it?
- Yes. Every recipe has a built-in chat where you can ask Mintdish to swap ingredients, change a technique, scale a step, or fix something it got wrong. You can also revert to the originally parsed version any time.
- Does Mintdish train AI models on my recipes or photos?
- No. Your saved recipes and uploaded photos are private to your account. Recipe content is sent to Google Gemini for parsing and chat, under Google's API terms — Mintdish does not train any models of its own and does not share your library with third parties beyond what is required to deliver the service.