Velvet Recipe Refiner: built using plugthis.ai

About

Recipe websites can be a lot sometimes. I enjoy cooking in my free time, but watching long cooking videos isn’t always feasible when you just want to know what you need to get started. So I open recipe pages online looking for simple instructions, and instead end up scrolling past long personal stories, ads, popups, videos, and endless text before I finally find the ingredients. 

So I built this extension to scratch my own itch, one that I’m hoping will be useful to many others as well. FilterX and Netflix IMDb Overlay are two other extensions I’ve built, both created to solve real, everyday pain points. 

Just Recipe is a Chrome extension that removes the noise from recipe pages and shows you just the recipe which is clean, clear, and easy to follow, in a side panel next to the page.

What this extension does:
- Extracts the core recipe from the page
- Shows ingredients with quantities
- Displays step-by-step instructions
- Includes prep and cook time when available 
- Keeps everything visible in a simple side panel

How it works:
1. Add the extension to Chrome
2. Open any recipe page
3. Click the extension icon
4. The recipe appears instantly in the side panel (in case you don’t see the recipe summary, try refreshing the page)
5. You can save your favourite recipes to come back to them later

What I like most is that the recipe stays open in the side panel while you scroll, switch tabs, or cook step by step, without having to reload the extension again and again.

Why is this extension different?
I’ve tried a few recipe summarisers from the Chrome Web Store, but none of them really worked for me. They often showed “recipe not found,” displayed nothing at all, failed to work on some cooking sites or showed the recipe as popups that kept disappearing. So I decided to build something the way I wanted it to work. 

A few things are different in this one:
- It lives in a side panel, so it doesn’t disappear in between
- It summarises recipes AND saves recipes for later, it’s two extensions in 1
- Calm, minimal UI

Your privacy matters:
- No tracking
- No analytics
- No accounts
- No data collection
- No external servers

Everything runs locally in your browser. The extension reads the current recipe page to generate the summary, and saved recipes (if any) are stored locally on your device.

DISCLAIMER:
This is an early version, built to solve a very specific problem simply and thoughtfully. Recipe websites vary a lot, so some pages may work better than others.

If something doesn’t extract correctly, feels confusing, or could be better, I genuinely want to hear about it. Your feedback will be invaluable to me.

Try it out, cook something nice, and let me know what you think :)

***This extension was built using PlugThis.ai (https://plugthis.ai/)