Getting started
From your first login to your first saved version, in about five minutes.
Your first login
When you log in for the first time, your library is a blank page. Shikomi even says so. Nothing is pre-filled. Your book fills up as you cook, not before.
The sidebar starts lean, too: Testing Lab and Versions stay locked until you have a recipe to use them on, so there are no empty rooms on day one.
Create your first recipe
On the Recipes screen, press + New / Import and pick how the recipe comes in:
- Paste it in: copy a recipe from anywhere (a website, a note, a text), paste the ingredients and steps one per line, and Shikomi parses the amounts into a structured v1 as you type.
- Paste a link: drop in a recipe URL and Shikomi reads the ingredients and steps right off the page, ready for your review.
- Describe it (beta): tell Sous Chef what you remember (“Grandma’s karaage: soy, ginger, double fry”) and it drafts the rest, marking every guess so you can confirm it.
Whichever route you take, nothing is saved until you review the draft. See Importing recipes for what each path looks like.
Anatomy of a recipe
Ingredients are attached to the steps that use them, with grams as the primary unit. Ounces, cups, and tablespoons are supported too, and you can set your default in Settings → Cooking Preferences.
Alongside the method, a recipe keeps its baker’s % ratios live, records its source and equipment, and treats any sub-recipes, like a tangzhong or a spice mix, as their own linked pages you can reuse across recipes.
Your first version
The moment you save, that draft becomes v1. From then on, every save adds a new version on top. Nothing is ever overwritten.
That chain of versions is the whole idea behind Shikomi. Read Versioning to see how it works.
You do not have to get v1 right. A rough first version is the point: you refine it into a keeper one saved version at a time.