Digitize your handwritten recipes

Grandma's recipe book, a stained recipe card, notes in your own notebook: take a photo, and Treecipes reads the handwriting and turns it into a clear recipe tree. The paper can stay in the drawer, the recipe is on your phone.

Try it now Or upload a photo in your browser

From a notebook page to a recipe tree

Open notebook with a handwritten recipe for Seelen, a Swabian spelt bread, on squared paper, with older amounts in brackets and a note in the margin — 1. Photograph the handwritten page

2. Get a recipe tree

loosen

Dissolve yeast and sugar in the water.

knead

Add yeast solution to the flour and salt and knead for 15 minutes into a viscous dough.

⏱️ 15 min

chill

Place in a large bowl in the refrigerator overnight.

preheat

Preheat to convection the next day.

🌡️ 230°C

Formen und Abstechen

Shape dough into a rectangle with wet hands and separate Seelen with the edge of your hand.

proof

Place on the baking sheet and let rise.

⏱️ 30 min

sprinkle

Sprinkle with salt and caraway seeds.

bake

Bake in the preheated oven.

⏱️ 20 min

caraway seeds

salt, coarse

yeast solution

preheated oven

resting Seelen

sprinkled Seelen

baked Seelen

yeast, fresh

0.5 Würfel

sugar

0.5 tsp

water, cold

480 ml

spelt flour, type 630

550 g

wheat flour

150 g

salt

2 tsp

Tap an ingredient or a step to tick it off. Open this recipe

What Treecipes can read

Recipe cards and notebooks

Cursive or block letters, on lined, squared or plain paper. Short forms such as tbsp, tsp or oz are understood.

Old family recipe books

Faded ink and yellowed pages are fine. If a recipe runs over two pages, add both: up to four pages make one recipe.

Recipes written as notes

Many handwritten recipes are just a list of ingredients and a few keywords. Treecipes works out which ingredients go into which step and lays the recipe out as a tree.

How to digitize a handwritten recipe

Take a photo

In the Treecipes app, tap "Add" and choose "Scan Recipe". On the web, open the converter and add a photo. Both take a new photo or one from your gallery.
Add the other pages

Does the recipe continue on the next page? Add up to four pages in the order of the recipe.
Check and save

After about a minute the recipe opens as a tree. Fix anything that was misread, then save it with your other recipes.
What is a recipe tree?

Tips for a photo that reads well

Use daylight or a bright lamp, and keep your own shadow off the page.
Hold the phone straight above the page so the lines do not slant.
If a page holds several recipes, crop the photo to the one you want.
A word you can hardly read yourself may be misread too. Check those ingredients and amounts in the result.

Keep family recipes safe

A handwritten recipe exists only once. Digitized, it cannot get lost or stained, you find it again with the search, and you can send the link to your family. The original stays a keepsake.

Start with your favorite family recipe

Try it now Or upload a photo in your browser

Printed recipe?

Cookbook pages, magazines and screenshots work the same way.

Scan printed recipes