Find saved Instagram recipes: how to get them back

Where are your saved Instagram recipes, exactly?

In more places than you think. Start with Saved in your profile menu, and look in the collections you made there. Then go through the posts you have liked, the chats where you sent a reel to yourself or to someone else, and your screenshots. The same recipe may well sit in three places while you can't find it in any of them straight away.

A good first step is to count: where have you left recipes? It takes a quarter of an hour, and afterwards you know what you are dealing with.

Why can't you find your saved recipes?

Because a saved post is not a recipe yet. It is a picture or a video with a caption, with no fixed name, cooking time or ingredient list. That is why you keep running into the same things:

• You don't know what it's called. A reel is often called 'make this tonight' rather than 'creamy spinach pasta'. If you search for a dish, you don't get far.
• You can't filter. You want something that takes twenty minutes, has no meat and uses what is left in the fridge. A pile of posts doesn't know those questions.
• You can't remember where it is. Saved, liked, sent to yourself or screenshotted: it is somewhere, but where?

How do you get a recipe out of Instagram and into one place?

Turn it into a real recipe, with ingredients, steps and a name you would search for, and keep it in one place. What you use matters less than doing it. A notes app works too, as long as you are willing to type everything out.

Make sure it has at least four things: a name you would really type in (so 'creamy spinach pasta' and not 'Tuesday reel'), the ingredients with quantities, the steps in order, and how many people it serves and how long it takes. Without those last two, you can do little with the recipe on a busy evening.

Start small. You won't move a full list in one evening, and you don't need to. Take the recipes you are really going to cook this month, move those, and leave the rest until you come across them again. If you haven't touched something for months, you may have wanted it less than you thought.

What does Smaquli do with an Instagram link?

Smaquli turns the link into a recipe with separate ingredients and steps. You paste the link to a post or reel, or you share it from Instagram. Smaquli looks first at the caption and at a recipe link in it. If there is nothing usable there, the app watches the video itself: what is said and what is on screen. That works for videos up to 10 minutes, and the video is not kept.

You always see a check screen first, before anything goes into your book. There every ingredient is split into quantity, unit and name, so you can check that everything is right. If you have saved the link before, Smaquli recognises it.

Sharing from Instagram works on Android through the share menu, where Smaquli appears once you have installed it. On an iPhone it goes through a Shortcut with a personal key. You install Smaquli from your browser, because there is no app in the App Store or on Google Play. There is more about videos on Recipes from videos. The app is in Dutch for now. English is on its way.

And if the recipe is in a chat?

Copy the text and paste it into Smaquli. That works for the recipe someone messaged you, and for sites that block fetching. Smaquli turns the text into the same thing as a link: separate ingredients, steps and a check screen first. That way you don't have to retype a recipe from a chat or a site. If you would rather type it yourself, smart input helps: '200 g chicken breast, diced' becomes a quantity, a unit, an ingredient and a note. Everything about saving recipes is on Save recipes.

If the recipe only lives in your head or in your mother's, you can also speak it. There is more on that in Preserving family recipes.

How do you find a saved recipe afterwards?

Search for the name of the recipe (a typo is no problem) or let the filters do the work. They answer the questions a pile of posts doesn't know. Under Total time you choose from Up to 20 min to Up to 2 hours, under Veg, fish or meat what you are eating tonight, under Method the oven, air fryer, one pan or no oven, and under Ingredients At most 5, 8 or 12. If something in the fridge needs using up, choose that ingredient and you see the recipes it appears in. You can sort by Newest, By name or Rating.

Smaquli estimates difficulty, chopping, type and method itself, so you never have to label anything. If an estimate is wrong, you choose yourself and your choice wins. You can see what a saved recipe looks like on red curry ramen with dumplings: separate ingredients, steps and a choice for the number of people. All the filters are on Find recipes.

What doesn't work?

Smaquli can't read a screenshot or a photo of a recipe. A link or the text it can. Facebook and Pinterest don't work via a link, so there you copy the text. Some recipe sites block fetching, and then you paste the text too. Videos that run longer than 10 minutes don't work.

With Free you import 2 recipes a month, via a link, video, text or by speaking, and you keep up to 10. With Premium you import and keep recipes without limit, with a brake against misuse. Prices are on Pricing.