Upload Your Own Recipes!

The Kitchen Stories team has been working hard on something new, something big, and it’s finally here: From here on out, you can upload your very own recipes to our app and share them with our global community! Uploading a recipe is not only easy, but a lot of fun, as you can share your creativity with step photos and videos in addition to your recipe text. With enough recipes uploaded, you can even create your own digital cookbook to have all your recipes at a glance, alongside ours.

Here, we’ll walk you through how to upload your (first) recipe step by step and provide you with everything to keep in mind along the way. If you’re looking for best practices for writing helpful step descriptions, finding the perfect recipe titles, and taking good food photos and videos with your mobile phone, keep reading: The Kitchen Stories team is sharing secret tips!

How to upload your recipe to Kitchen Stories

You can upload a recipe step by step while cooking, or simply complete it afterwards. Each recipe is automatically saved as a draft, so there’s no need to rush and you can exit and revisit it as many times as you wish before finishing it up. All recipe drafts can be found on your profile—accessible via the bottom menu bar—and all recipe drafts are private, visible only to you.

Important note: Make sure to always download the latest version of the Kitchen Stories app. This way, you’ll always be on track with new updates and more refined functions.

Step 1:

Open the Kitchen Stories app on your mobile phone and click “Create” on the bottom menu bar to start your recipe.

Choose a recipe title and upload a final photo of your dish. If you just started cooking and the dish isn’t done yet, you can skip this and upload the final photo later. However, please return before submitting and upload your final photo. Then, click “Next.”

Step 2:

Let’s continue with some general information about your recipe.

- Portion type: In order for the community to estimate the amount of the dish, either specify the servings (how maybe people the dish feeds) or the pieces (e.g. slices of cake or number of cookies).

- Difficulty: Here you can decide between easy, medium, and hard. There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing the difficulty setting: How complicated is it to cook your recipe? Are there special ingredients or interesting utensils required? Does it need to rest for a long time? In these cases, it might make sense to choose the difficulty “medium” or “hard” to show others that it takes more effort to recreate your dish (but it’s still worth it, of course!)

- Timing: In order to estimate the time it takes to cook your recipe, we’ve divided the cooking time into preparation time, baking time, and resting time.

The preparation time refers to the time that you actively spend making your dish like cutting vegetables, frying, or cook something in a frying pan. The baking time states how long your dish needs in the oven and the resting time determines if and how long your dish needs to rest at any point like for marinating, freezing, rising, or cooling.

Step 3:

Before cooking, you usually go shopping and prep your ingredients—right? This is exactly why we also start your recipe with the ingredient list. Here, you need to choose all the ingredients that will be used for your dish. If you need an ingredient in several steps (e.g. ½ cup sugar for the batter and ¼ cup sugar for the frosting), you need to add the ingredient several times, too.
You can easily type the ingredient into the given field. We have an extensive list with more than 1,500 ingredients and all you have to do is select the one that you want. If you can’t find your ingredient, try another spelling or think of some synonyms. If you still can’t find it, just write it into the field and click “Next.” Then, enter the amount that’s needed.

Some ingredients may need important characteristics. Let’s say you’re preparing a dough and it’s crucial that the butter is cold. For these kinds of ingredients, we’ve already set up a list of characteristics to choose from.

In addition, you have the option to choose a special use for some ingredients. This makes sense if you can’t tell the exact amount needed, like vegetable oil for frying, flour for dusting, parsley for serving, or salt to taste. We’ve compiled a list with common uses for you to choose from.

Once you’ve added an ingredient with all the necessary details, click “Save” and continue until all ingredients are added to the list.

Step 4:

Each recipe is divided into several steps that describe the cooking process in chronological order. Write a description for each step that tells what needs to be done.

In addition, you can upload a photo or video to each step to help others visualize it. You can either record it while cooking or choose a picture or video from your library. Videos can be up to 20 seconds long and are displayed in a square (1x1) format.

If you finished a step, you can now pick the ingredients and utensils that you need for this specific step. If you now realize that you forgot to add an ingredient, simply use the menu to go back and add it to your ingredient list.

Click “Save” to finish a step and continue with the next one until you’ve finished entering the recipe.

Step 5:

You’re almost done! By choosing matching categories for your recipe, you can help the community find it.

Choose from a given set of categories which represent your recipe: is it a starter, main, or dessert? Is it from a specific cuisine or does it fit to a specific occasion like weeknight dinners, on-the-go recipes, or Christmas?

Last but not least, you can write a “chef’s note.” This is the place to give additional tips or share the story behind your dish. What is it inspired by? Is it possible to substitute an ingredient? What can be combined or served with your dish?

Step 6:

By now you have entered all the information about your recipe. By clicking “Preview” you can see how you recipe looks so far. Read carefully through all the steps and check whether there are any spelling mistakes, or if you forgot to add an ingredient or utensil. If you want to change something, simply click on the cross on the top left corner to leave the preview mode. Now you can go back in the menu to change the step texts, ingredients, step photos, etc.

If you’re happy with your recipe, click the “Submit final recipe” button. Your recipe is now sent to the Kitchen Stories team who will do one final check on the recipe. This process can take up to a few days, so be patient with us! As soon as your recipe is live, you’ll receive a notification. If there’s a problem or missing information, you can go back to edit your recipe and submit it three times in total.

That was easy!

You’re recipe was approved and is now live. You can see it on the app next to all the other uploaded recipes by our community. Your recipe can be liked, commented on, and cooked!

You can publish and share as many recipes as you want and we’re excited to what our global community comes up with! Be creative, dig out the family cookbook, and share with your friends—we can’t wait.