Recipe Ingredient Extractor

This tool reads the structured recipe data (Schema.org JSON-LD) that most recipe websites embed in their pages. It extracts the ingredient list, recipe title, and serving count without requiring you to manually copy each line.

Concrete scenarios: a home cook on a meal-kit budget pulling three recipes from their favorite blog into a single grocery-list document without the ads, pop-ups, and 2000-word life-stories-about-childhood-pasta that wrap the actual recipe; someone halving a family-size recipe to cook for two without doing fraction math on every line; a chef adapting a recipe from a US source (cups, Fahrenheit) for a European kitchen (grams, Celsius). The scale slider and unit dropdowns handle all three cases in seconds.

Under the hood, the URL you paste is sent to a Toobits API route (`/api/tools/recipe-extractor`) which server-side fetches the page, because your browser cannot fetch arbitrary cross-origin URLs due to CORS. The HTML is parsed for `<script type="application/ld+json">` blocks, filtered for entries with `@type: Recipe` or a `mainEntityOfPage` that points to a Recipe, and the `recipeIngredient` array plus `recipeYield` and `name` fields are returned to your browser. The fetched HTML is discarded immediately — no recipe data is stored on Toobits' servers. Your extracted recipe is then persisted only in your browser's localStorage so you can reload the tab without losing it.

Known limitations: the tool only works on pages that embed JSON-LD Recipe structured data, which excludes many older food blogs, social media posts, PDFs, and image-based recipes. If extraction fails, the page probably lacks the required metadata. The extracted ingredient strings preserve the site's original phrasing ("1 ½ cups flour, sifted"), so the scale slider works by multiplying the numeric prefix; compound quantities like "1 can (14 oz)" only scale the outer number. Compared to manually copying each line from a recipe page and then adjusting the scale in your head, this tool is noticeably faster and reduces transcription errors. Pair with the Recipe Measurement Converter for density-based ingredient conversions and the Recipe Scaler for manual ingredient scaling.