Photograph a card
Point the camera at the card — even the faded, splattered ones. Kouzina reads the handwriting into ingredients and steps, and keeps the photo with the recipe.
A private cookbook for one family — yours
The recipes that matter aren’t on the internet.
They’re on a splattered index card in your mother’s drawer, in a group chat from 2019, in your aunt’s head. Kouzina gathers them into one private cookbook the whole family builds and cooks from — kept exactly as they were written, for good.
Coming soonApp Store
Get it onGoogle Play
On an iPhone? Use Kouzina in your browser now — the App Store version is on its way.
The shoebox
Recipe sites are built for strangers. Kouzina is built for the eight people who’ll actually cook this.
Every family has a shoebox. Cards in three different hands. A page torn from a magazine with a note down the side. The cake nobody wrote down because Mum just knows it. It doesn’t search, it doesn’t scale, and it’s one house move from gone.
Kouzina is one private cookbook for the whole family. Everyone you invite adds to it, everyone cooks from it, and none of it is public.
Rescue Day
Bring the shoebox. Leave with a cookbook.
Three ways in. Each one lands as a draft beside the original, for you to check before it’s saved.
Paste the text
The recipe in the family chat, the email from your aunt, the note on your phone. Paste it in and it becomes a recipe, ingredients and method sorted out for you.
Paste a link
The one good recipe from that blog, with its photo. The pop-ups and the life story stay behind.
Nothing is tidied, converted or “improved”. If the card says a knob of butter, the recipe says a knob of butter — in the family’s own words, with the original kept alongside.
Kept, not just copied
In her hand. In her voice.
The photo of the original card stays with the recipe, so you can always see how she wrote it. Record her explaining the part that was never written down — how the dough should feel, how you know it’s done — and the recording is kept with the recipe for whoever cooks it next.
One cookbook, whole family
Everyone adds. Everyone cooks.
Invite the family and they’re in — parents, cousins, the one who moved away. Every recipe says who added it and where it came from. Sections, search and favourites keep it easy to find — and browse as tidy index cards or as photo posters. When a friend asks for the recipes, hand them a read-only link to the cookbook — and switch it off whenever you like.
At the stove
Cook mode, one step at a time.
Big type, the next step peeking, a timer in the header, and the screen stays awake. Tick off ingredients as they go in. Cooking for a bigger table? Pinch to scale and every quantity follows — in cups or grams, whichever you cook in.
The permanence promise
A book you can hold.
Print the whole cookbook whenever you like, photos and all, every recipe with who it came from. Give it at Christmas; keep one in the kitchen drawer. Your recipes are never locked up: everything you put in, you can take out.
For the family abroad
Read it in your language.
Yiayia’s recipe in her own hand, and beside it the same recipe in the grandchild’s language. Kouzina now reads recipes in nine languages — Greek, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Polish. The original never changes; the translation sits alongside it, amounts and all.
Roadmap
Here now, and what’s next.
Kouzina is built and in testing. Whatever arrives below, the recipes you add stay exactly as they were written.
Here now
- A private family cookbook — invite everyone, nothing public
- Rescue a recipe from a photo, pasted text or a link
- Her handwriting kept, her voice recorded with the recipe
- Cook mode with timers, scaling and a full unit converter
- Read recipes in nine languages, the original untouched
- Browse as ruled index cards or as photo posters
- Read-only share links, and print the whole book to PDF
- The Android app, on Google Play, and the web app in any browser
Coming next
- iPhone & iPad app — the App Store version, sized for tablets as well as phones
- Meal planning for the week ahead
- A shopping list built from what you’re cooking
- Tags & collections, to group recipes your own way
- A family activity feed — see what’s just been added
Pricing
The cookbook is yours. You pay for the rescuing.
Typing a recipe in costs us nothing, so it is free, for as many recipes and as many people as you like. Reading a splattered card and turning it into a recipe takes real work, so that is what the price is for.
Freewhile we’re new
everything below, for the whole family
- 25 rescues to start — photograph a card, paste a message, drop in a link
- Unlimited recipes typed in by hand, unlimited family members
- Photos, voice notes, cook mode, scaling & unit conversion
- Read in nine languages · browse as cards or posters
- Print the whole book to PDF, whenever you like
When we start charging it will be $12.99 a year for the whole family, which buys 100 rescues a year. Everything you have added stays yours either way — to read, cook from, print, and add to by hand.
Questions
The things people ask.
Families with recipes worth keeping and nowhere good to keep them. The person who ends up holding the shoebox after a clear-out. The one abroad who wants to cook what home tastes like. Anyone who has ever photographed a card and then lost the photo.
Completely. Your cookbook has no public pages, no feed, no followers and no ads. The only people who can see it are the ones you invite. If you share the cookbook by link, that link shows a read-only copy of the recipes — text only, no photos, no names — and you can switch it off at any time.
We never use your recipes, photos or recordings to train anything. Read the privacy policy — it’s short.
Fidelity. Recipe apps tidy, convert and “improve”. Kouzina keeps the recipe the way the family says it — the odd units, the “you’ll know when” — with the original card and her voice kept alongside. It’s a cookbook for one family, not a library for everyone.
You keep everything, and you keep using it. Every recipe, photo and recording stays where it is; you can still cook from it, edit it, print the whole book and add new recipes by typing them in. Only the AI rescues — reading a photographed card, a pasted message or a link — pause until you come back. Recipes that were meant to outlast websites shouldn’t be held hostage by one. Recipes that were meant to outlast websites shouldn’t be held hostage by one.
Yes, any time. Print the whole cookbook to PDF, photos included, and keep it wherever you like. The text is yours; nothing about Kouzina is a lock.
Yes — today. Write recipes in any language, and read a recipe in your own: Yiayia’s Greek beside the grandchildren’s English, across nine languages. The original always stays exactly as written; the translation sits beside it, and the amounts convert too.
Yes. One tap prints the whole cookbook to PDF with every photo and who each recipe came from, ready for the printer or the print shop. Print one recipe for the fridge, or the whole book for Christmas.
On Android phones and tablets it’s on Google Play now, and the web app at app.kouzina.app works in any browser, iPhone included. The iPhone and iPad app is coming from the App Store, and the waiting list hears first. A recipe someone shares with you by link opens in any browser, with no app and no account needed.
A note from the kitchen
Why I built it
I built Kouzina for my own family. My wife Irene’s family are in Greece, and the recipes that matter most to her — her mother’s — have never lived anywhere but on cards and in people’s heads. I wanted one place where all of us, here and there, could keep those recipes exactly as they were given and cook from them. Not a recipe website; the family’s own cookbook, kept properly. If that sounds like your family too, I’d love you to join us.
— Jeff, Kouzina
Early access