I got tired of scrolling past life stories, so I built a recipe extraction API.

#api #python #webdev #sideprojects

You know the drill. You search for a banana bread recipe and land on a page
with 2,000 words about someone's grandmother, six pop-up ads, and a video
that follows you down the screen. The actual ingredients are somewhere
near the bottom.

I built recipescraper.pro to fix that for
myself: paste a recipe link, get just the recipe. Then I realized developers
building meal planners, grocery apps, or cooking bots have the same problem
at scale, so I turned the engine into an API.

What it does

Send it a link to a recipe page (or a YouTube cooking video) and you get
clean JSON back:

{
  "title": "JB's Banana Bread",
  "ingredients": [
    "2 1/4 cup plain flour / all-purpose flour",
    "1 1/4 tsp cinnamon powder",
    "1/3 cup vegetable oil"
  ],
  "instructions": "Preheat oven and line loaf pan. Whisk dry ingredients together...",
  "source_url": "https://www.recipetineats.com/banana-bread-recipe/"
}

No HTML parsing on your side, and Celsius temperatures get converted to
Fahrenheit along the way.

Quick example (Python)

import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://recipe-extractor2.p.rapidapi.com/recipe",
    params={"url": "https://www.recipetineats.com/banana-bread-recipe/"},
    headers={
        "X-RapidAPI-Key": "your-key",
        "X-RapidAPI-Host": "recipe-extractor2.p.rapidapi.com",
    },
)
recipe = resp.json()
print(recipe["title"])
for item in recipe["ingredients"]:
    print("-", item)

How it works under the hood

Most recipe sites embed structured schema.org Recipe data for Google.
The API reads that first, falls back to site-specific parsers, and for
YouTube videos it works from the video's captions and description.

Honest limitations

Some large publishers block automated requests, so a few sites won't import. When that happens you get a clear error explaining why.
Links need to point to a single recipe, not a category or list page.

Two companion APIs

If you need more than raw text:

Ingredient Parser: turns "2 1/2 cups flour, sifted" into structured quantity / unit / ingredient / notes.
Recipe Scaler: scales a recipe up or down and converts US ↔ metric with kitchen-friendly fractions.

Try it

There's a free plan, so you can test it with your own recipe links
without paying anything.

👉 Recipe Extractor on RapidAPI

I'd love feedback, especially recipe sites that don't parse well. Drop a
link in the comments and I'll take a look.

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