How to Import a Recipe from Instagram
5 min read
Instagram is where a lot of cooking inspiration lives, but it is a difficult place to keep a recipe. A Reel is gone the moment you keep scrolling, the method is buried in a long caption you have to tap to expand, and a Story with the recipe you wanted vanishes after 24 hours. Cooking Together turns an Instagram recipe into a proper structured recipe — ingredients, steps, photo, and a link back to the creator — so it survives past your feed.
Instagram has a few different formats and each behaves a little differently. This guide covers Reels, regular feed posts, carousels, and Stories, plus what to do when the recipe is mostly in the caption.
Reels and feed posts: share to Cooking Together
For a Reel or a normal feed post, the quickest route is the share button. Tap the paper-plane Share icon under the post, then choose Cooking Together from the share sheet (on a fresh install you may need to tap More the first time to enable it). The app reads the post, its caption, and any on-screen text and builds a recipe from what it finds.
If you already copied the post link, you can instead open Cooking Together, start an import, and paste the URL. Same result, useful when a friend sends you a link directly.
Carousels: the recipe is often spread across slides
Instagram carousel posts (the ones with multiple images you swipe through) frequently put the finished dish on the first slide and the ingredients or steps on later slides. When you import a carousel, glance through the original slides and make sure nothing from a later image got missed, then add it in the draft. The import does the heavy lifting; you are just checking the slides it could not see text on.
Stories: act before they expire
Stories are the trickiest format because they disappear after 24 hours (unless the creator saved them to a Highlight). If someone you follow posts a recipe in a Story, import it the same day. If it is already in a Highlight, open the specific Story frame and share or copy its link, then import as usual. Once it is in Cooking Together it is permanent, regardless of what happens to the original Story.
When the recipe is mostly in the caption
A lot of Instagram cooks write the full recipe in the caption and use the video purely as a teaser. That is good news for importing — captions are text, so the importer can read the ingredients and method directly. Expand the caption before you import so you can compare it against the draft, and if the creator used an unusual format (everything in one paragraph, or measurements in a different system), tidy the structured result in a few taps.
- Expand the full caption first so you can spot anything the import should catch.
- Check the serving size is set so future scaling is accurate.
- Keep the link to the creator — attribution stays attached automatically.
- Save it to a collection so it does not get lost among your other imports.
Frequently asked questions
Can I import from a private Instagram account?
You can import content you are able to view. If a post is from a private account you follow, share or copy its link the same way; if a post is fully private or restricted, the importer may not be able to read it, in which case you can paste the recipe text manually.
What if the post has no written recipe at all?
If a Reel only shows cooking without listing ingredients or amounts anywhere, there may not be enough to reconstruct a full recipe. Cooking Together will fill in what it can and flag the rest for you to complete rather than inventing details.
Does the original creator still get credited?
Yes. Every import keeps a link back to the original Instagram post and creator.
Get the app
Cooking Together is free on iPhone, iPad, and Android. Import your first recipe in under a minute.