How to Save Recipes from Instagram and TikTok

The fastest way to save a recipe from Instagram or TikTok is to keep two things together: the post's link and the text of its caption. The bookmark button only saves a pointer to the post, so if the creator deletes it or you change phones, the recipe is gone. Copy the link, copy the caption (or screenshot it), and put both somewhere you can cook from.

That is the whole trick. Below is how to do it on each app, what to do when the recipe is only spoken in the video, and how Matlaro turns a post into a recipe you can cook one step at a time.

Why the Save button is not enough

Instagram's bookmark under a post and TikTok's Favourites both work like a browser bookmark. They are fine for "I might make this one day". They are poor for cooking, for three reasons:

Instagram does keep your saved posts private: only you can see them. Private is not the same as permanent, though.

Step 1: get the link

Both apps put the link behind the share button.

Keep the link even if you copy everything else. It is your record of where the recipe came from and a way back to the video when you want to see how thick the sauce should look.

Step 2: get the caption

This is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters. Most food creators put the ingredients and the method in the caption, often below a "more" fold.

1. Open the post and tap "more" so the full caption is showing.
2. If your app lets you select the caption text, copy it.
3. If it does not, take a screenshot of the expanded caption. If it is long, take two.

A screenshot of a caption is not a picture of food, it is text. Any tool that can read text off an image can turn it back into words, which is why a screenshot is a perfectly good way to save a recipe.

Step 3: put it somewhere you can cook from

You have a few options, and they trade convenience for cookability.

If you want the long version of that comparison, we wrote one: five ways to organise your recipes, with honest pros and cons.

How Matlaro saves a post

Matlaro has a flow made for exactly this, called Add from a post. It does not scrape Instagram or TikTok. It keeps the link and lets you bring the caption in one step.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

• A recipe needs ingredients and a method. If a caption is just "so good 🤤 recipe in bio", there is nothing to save, and Matlaro tells you so rather than guessing at amounts.
• Headings help. Captions that say "Ingredients" and "Method" (or "Steps") read cleanly. If a caption runs everything together, paste it with those two headings added.
• A refusal is free. On the free plan you get 5 imports a month, and only a recipe that is actually saved counts. Typing a recipe in by hand never counts at all.
• The text passes through once. To sort the caption into ingredients and steps, its text goes through Matlaro's server once and is not kept there. The recipe itself is stored on your phone.

Cooking it

Once the post is a recipe, it behaves like any other. Cook mode shows one step at a time in large type, and when a step says "simmer for 15 minutes", the 15 minutes is a timer you tap. Feeding four instead of the two the creator cooked for? Change the servings and every amount follows. We explain how that maths works, and where to round, in how to scale a recipe up or down.