Sift

Sift is an iOS recipe keeper that notices when a Safari page contains a recipe, pulls out just the ingredients and the steps, and stores a clean copy on your device for when you're actually cooking. The problem is familiar to anyone who cooks from the web. Recipe pages are wrapped in ads, autoplay video, and a long story before the method, and the moment you need to check a quantity your phone has locked or the page has reloaded and scrolled away. Sift keeps the recipe and drops the rest. It stores the recipe itself rather than a bookmark, which means it's still there when the page moves, the site paywalls, or you're standing in a kitchen with no signal.

It works through a Safari extension paired with the app. As you browse, the extension detects recipes automatically and offers to save them. Extraction runs in four tiers, reading JSON-LD schema markup first, then microdata, then readability heuristics for pages that don't mark up their recipes, and finally letting you paste the text by hand when nothing else works. There's no AI involved and no cloud service in the loop. Recipes are stored locally on the device, the app works offline, and it doesn't require an account, so there's nothing to sign up for before the first recipe lands in the library. The order of the tiers matters. JSON-LD comes first because it's the structured recipe markup sites publish for search engines and it gives the cleanest result, microdata catches older sites, the readability pass handles blogs that never marked anything up, and manual paste is the safety net for everything else, so the outcome is a saved recipe rather than an error message.

The cooking side is where the detail shows. Cook Mode keeps the screen on while you work, so you're not unlocking the phone with floury hands every two minutes. Timers mentioned in a step are detected automatically and start a Lock Screen countdown that survives closing the app. Recipes scale from half to ten times with fractions adjusted properly, there are ingredient substitution suggestions, and you can compare two recipes side by side when you're choosing between versions of the same dish. The library keeps the order you give it and records a cook history, and an ingredient list can be sent to Reminders, Notes, or a text message for the shop. None of that needs a connection, which is the point of storing the recipe rather than a link to it.

It's for iPhone and iPad owners on iOS 17 or later who cook from online recipes and want a simple, ad-free copy without the meal-planning and grocery-list machinery that bigger recipe apps bolt on. The developer is explicit that Sift doesn't do meal planning or grocery lists, which is a feature if you've been put off by apps that try to run your kitchen and a limitation if that's what you wanted. It also suits people who care where their data lives. With no account and no cloud sync, the recipes exist on the device and nowhere else, which is a comfort for privacy and worth remembering when you change phones.

A typical evening looks like this. You find a recipe on your phone, the extension spots it and you save it, and later in the kitchen you open Sift, put it in Cook Mode, and the screen stays awake while your hands are busy. When a step says to simmer for twenty minutes, the timer is already there and it keeps counting on the Lock Screen even if you switch to a podcast app or the phone goes in your pocket. If four people turned into eight, you scale it and the fractions come out right. Afterwards the cook history records that you made it, and the ingredient list can go to Reminders for the next shop.

What sets it apart is the restraint. Many recipe savers push you into a subscription and a sync account on day one. Sift is free, has no ads, and keeps everything on the device, and the four-tier extraction means it copes with badly built recipe pages instead of failing on anything without schema markup. There's a browser version at app.siftapp.me with a limited feature set, and browser extensions for other browsers are in development. The developer describes the browser version as limited, so the iOS app remains the real product and the web is a convenience.

The limits follow from the same choices. It's iOS only, there's no cloud sync between devices, and the browser version is deliberately limited. A Sift Pro subscription is planned, with pricing and timing not yet announced, and the developer says the existing features will stay free. The app is on the App Store now, and support is at hello@siftapp.me. It's a young app from a small developer, so the pace of updates and the shape of the Pro tier are still to be seen, but the free version is complete enough to judge on its own.