A home cook's story: why I built YummJar — to keep every recipe I love in one place, always with a beautiful photo, and world dishes in their original form.
Why I built YummJar
I'm Dominik, and I built YummJar because I'm a home cook with a problem I could never quite solve: my recipes were everywhere, and none of it felt like my collection.
A shelf full of cookbooks — and recipes scattered everywhere else
I love to cook. Over the years I collected a whole shelf of cookbooks, and on top of that I'm constantly browsing food websites and social media, saving dishes that catch my eye. The problem: those recipes lived in a dozen different places — bookmarks, screenshots, saved posts, links I sent to myself. When I actually wanted to cook something, I could never find it again. I wanted one personal collection: everything I love, in one place, that I would never lose.
Cooking is also about how it looks
Here's what bugged me most. So many saved recipes had no picture — or a bad one. And cooking and eating are about aesthetics too. A recipe with a beautiful photo is inviting; a wall of text is not. I hated having to hunt around for a nice image, or just live without one. I wanted every recipe in my collection to look as good as the food deserves. That's why YummJar creates a beautiful image for any recipe that doesn't have one — so your collection always looks appetizing, not like a spreadsheet.
I want the original, not a watered-down copy
I'm fascinated by dishes from all over the world, and I want the real thing — the original recipe, not some imported and adapted version that's had its character sanded off. Too often the recipes you find online are simplified or "localized" until they lose what made them special. YummJar lets me import a recipe in its original language and translate it into mine while keeping it intact — so I get the authentic dish, in words I can actually cook from.
So I built the app I wanted to use
I tried the recipe apps that already existed, but none of them fit — some were missing the features I wanted, others felt clunky or looked dated. If I was going to use something every day, it had to work the way I think and look as good as the food deserves. So I built it. YummJar is the tool I always wished existed:
- Save from anywhere — websites, social media, screenshots, photos of cookbook pages, even handwriting or your voice. The AI turns it into a clean, consistent recipe.
- Always with a picture — if a recipe has no photo, YummJar creates a beautiful one for you.
- Original, in your language — import recipes from any language and translate them without losing the original.
- Actually organized — automatic categories and tags, scaling for any number of servings, and shopping lists that merge ingredients across recipes.
It started as a fix for my own messy, beautiful, worldwide recipe collection. If you cook the way I do — curious, a little obsessed, and unwilling to lose a great recipe ever again — I built YummJar for you too.
— Dominik
