How to Cook Hands-Free with Cooking Mode
5 min read
Cooking from your phone usually means a small grease-smeared screen that dims every thirty seconds and a recipe you have to keep scrolling back through to find your place. Cooking mode in Cooking Together is built to fix exactly that. It turns any recipe into a focused, step-by-step view designed to be read from across the kitchen while your hands are busy.
Here is how to get the most out of it.
Start cooking mode
Open any recipe and start cooking mode. Instead of one long scroll, you get one step at a time in large, readable text. Move forward and back through the steps as you go, so you always know exactly where you are — no hunting for "wait, which step was I on?" halfway through.
The screen stays awake
Cooking mode keeps your screen on for the whole session, so it will not dim or lock while you are waiting for onions to soften or your hands are covered in flour. When you finish and leave cooking mode, your screen goes back to its normal timeout — it only overrides it while you are actually cooking.
Check off ingredients as you go
You can tap ingredients off as you add them, which is the simplest way to avoid the classic "did I already put the salt in?" mistake. It also makes mise en place easier: run down the list, gather and prep each item, and check it off before you start.
Scale the recipe to the right number of servings
Cooking for two when the recipe serves six? Change the serving size and the ingredient amounts scale automatically — no mental math, no measuring out three-quarters of an egg in your head. Premium users also get smart scaling, which handles the awkward conversions more gracefully than a straight multiply, and per-recipe nutrition estimates.
Cook two things at once with multi-cook mode
When dinner is a main plus a side that both need attention, multi-cook mode lets you keep two recipes open and switch between them without losing your place in either. It is the difference between calmly alternating between two dishes and frantically scrolling back and forth in a single recipe.
It adapts to your device
Cooking mode is designed for phones and tablets alike. Prop a tablet on the counter and the larger layout makes the current step readable from a few steps away; on a phone it stays compact and thumb-friendly. Either way the goal is the same: glance, cook, glance again, without fiddling.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be online to use cooking mode?
Once a recipe has loaded, cooking mode is about reading and stepping through content you already have open, so a brief drop in connection mid-cook will not derail you.
Is cooking mode free?
Yes. Cooking mode, step-by-step view, screen-awake, ingredient check-off, and basic serving scaling are all free. Smart scaling and per-recipe nutrition analysis are premium extras.
Get the app
Cooking Together is free on iPhone, iPad, and Android. Import your first recipe in under a minute.