Import a recipe with AI

AI import turns a recipe into the recipe format, ready to review and save. It lives in the chat with Mirabel: give her recipe text, a link, or a photo, and she builds a draft you open in the editor to save. This page is the short version — the full walkthroughs live on her page.

Use AI import for a website, a dictation, a foreign-language source, a cookbook page, an index card, or a handwritten note. To import recipes you already have as .md, .txt, or .zip files, use Markdown import instead — it’s separate and doesn’t use AI.

Before you start

• Look for the Add Recipe button at the top of your recipes list. Tap it and Mirabel walks you through where the recipe’s coming from. The button and her guided interview are always there for a kitchen member — importing from a website, pasted text, or a file works without any AI. What needs an Anthropic API key is AI itself: the photo route, and the AI read this page’s other sections describe (the fallback when a page or paste is too messy to read plainly). Without a key, the photo option isn’t offered and a messy source can’t escalate to AI — Mirabel reads what she can on her own or asks you to paste the text in. (On mirepoix.recipes the key is set by the operator. Self-hosted deployments set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in their environment.)
• Each kitchen shares one monthly AI allowance across everyone in it — the same pool covers AI import and Mirabel’s chat. Importing keeps working when it runs out, because she reads what she can on her own; her chat pauses until the allowance resets on the 1st of each month.

The short version

1. Tap Add Recipe at the top of your recipes list. Mirabel opens and asks where the recipe’s coming from.
2. Pick a source — From a website, From a photo, I’ll paste the text, or From a file — and give her the recipe when she asks.
3. Watch for the Recipe draft card she adds to the chat; ask for changes in plain words until it looks right.
4. Tap Open in editor (or Save it) to open the draft in the full-page recipe editor, review it, and click Save. Nothing is saved until you save it here.

Read directly, with no AI

When you paste a recipe — and for many web pages too — Mirepoix first tries to read it itself, without AI. If it comes through clearly, your draft appears right away. Mirabel says where the draft came from — read straight from the site’s own recipe data, or pieced together from the text. She also points out anything to double-check, like a title she wasn’t sure about or ingredient lines that didn’t parse cleanly. A draft she reads this way is free: it doesn’t count against your monthly AI allowance.

A website’s structured recipe data reads into a faithful draft with no AI, and a single rough ingredient line no longer breaks the whole import. Any rough lines are flagged for you to double-check — never handed off to AI. She turns to AI only for messier sources: text you paste, a page’s visible text that’s too jumbled to read plainly, or a structured page too broken to read on its own. That fallback runs only when AI is available. Photos always use AI.

When the allowance is used up, importing still works for pasted text and most web pages — Mirabel does her best to read it on her own and tells you to review the draft carefully before saving. If she can’t make out a recipe on her own, she’ll ask you to copy the recipe text and paste it in instead. Either way, running out of the allowance no longer stops you from importing.

On a draft she read directly, a Use AI instead choice appears under it. Tap it to redo that import with AI — useful if the quick read missed a step or an amount.

The import bookmarklet now reads a page’s structured recipe data, not only its visible text. Most food blogs and recipe sites publish that data behind the page. When the bookmarklet finds it, your draft appears right away with no AI, and Mirabel says it came straight from the site’s recipe data. A page without it falls back to the visible text, the same as before. She pieces the draft together from that and points out anything to double-check. Already dragged the button to your bookmarks bar? Re-drag it from Settings to pick up the upgrade — the older one keeps working on page text until you do.

Each way in has its own walkthrough on Mirabel’s page:

• Import a recipe by pasting it
• Import a recipe from a photo
• Import a recipe from a link
• Import from your browser or by sharing — the bookmarklet and the phone Share sheet

Where the recipe came from

Give Mirabel a link — paste the address, or send the page in with the import bookmarklet — and the draft records that address as the recipe’s Source. The saved recipe shows it at the bottom of the page as a link back to the original, and the site’s name comes from the address itself, never from a guess. She won’t repeat the link as a footer note as well: the recipe has its own field for it. This happens whether she read the page on her own or handed it to AI.

When the source isn’t a link — it’s named in the text you pasted, printed on the photo you took, or something you told her (“this is from Julia Child”) — there’s no address to record. She credits it in the recipe’s footer instead: “Based on a recipe from Julia Child.” Either way she never invents a source. If the recipe doesn’t say where it came from, the draft leaves it blank, and you can fill in the Source field yourself when you edit the recipe.

When you import from a link, she also brings over the page’s photo if it has one. You won’t see it while you review the draft — it’s added when you save, ready to replace or remove on the recipe. A link with no photo imports the same, just without one.

See also

• Mirabel, your kitchen helper — where AI import lives, and what else she can do
• Markdown import — import recipe files without AI
• Nutrition — match any ingredients the catalog didn’t recognize after import
• Data and privacy — what’s sent to Anthropic, and what isn’t

Last updated July 17, 2026