Simply Chef: Save any recipe

Share a recipe from Safari and it's a table before you've set the phone down. Save it once and it's on your iPhone and your iPad, in your own iCloud.

A recipe becomes one table you can take in at a glance.

Every recipe online is the same shape: a thousand words of story, an ingredient list somewhere in the middle, then numbered steps that never say which ingredients they need or what should already be done.

Ingredients run down the left. Every column to the right is one operation — melt, whisk, fold, bake. Cells merge where things come together, so the shape of the whole dish sits on a single screen. You can see that the butter and sugar are creamed before the eggs go in, and that the dry mix was waiting the whole time.

GETTING A RECIPE IN Share a link from Safari and it converts right there in the share sheet, then saves to your collection. Or open the app and paste a link, or paste the recipe text itself. Nothing to sign up for.

KEEPING WHAT YOU SAVE Everything you convert goes into your collection and stays there. Star the ones you cook often, search by name to get one back, and open any of them with no connection at all. Save a recipe on your phone and it is already on your iPad, because your collection follows your Apple Account.

MADE FOR A PROPPED-UP PHONE Type sized to be read from arm's length with your hands full. Tap a step to check it off, tap an ingredient once you have it ready. Hold a step to light up everything that feeds into it. One button switches between fitting the whole table on screen and giving every column room to breathe.

SCALING AND UNITS Halve, double or triple a recipe and the quantities follow. Show cups, grams, or both at once.

NOTHING INVENTED Every conversion is checked before you see it: each ingredient has to be used, and each step has to trace back to real ingredients or to earlier steps. When a recipe cannot be drawn as a clean table, you get a plain list instead of a broken grid. When the source lists something it never uses, the app tells you rather than quietly dropping it.

NO ACCOUNT, NO SERVER Recipes live on your device and, if you use iCloud, in your own private iCloud. No public library, no analytics, nothing to opt out of. Nothing is sent to us, because there is no server of ours that could receive it.

IPHONE AND IPAD The table is designed at tablet width rather than stretched up from the phone. On an iPad, most recipes fit on one screen with nothing to scroll.

Three sample recipes come with the app, so you can see how the format handles a simple chain, two mixtures folded together, and a component made ahead — before you convert anything of your own.

One purchase. No subscription.

Table format invented by Michael Chu at cookingforengineers.com.