How to save recipes from Pinterest so you can cook them

Pinterest is where a lot of people collect recipes, and it is also where a lot of those recipes turn out to be missing. A pin is usually a photo with a title and a link back to the website it came from. Saving it to a board saves that picture and link. The recipe itself stays on the website, which may have changed, moved or vanished by the time you want to cook.

So the reliable way to keep a Pinterest recipe has two steps: follow the pin to the page where the recipe lives, and save that page somewhere that keeps its own copy.

Why boards are not a recipe collection

• A pin is a picture and a link. Many pins carry nothing but a dish name. The ingredients are on the source site.
• Links rot. Blogs move, rename pages and shut down, and a pin keeps pointing at the old address. We wrote about what to do when a saved recipe disappears from a website.
• You cannot shop from a board. There is no ingredient list to check against your fridge, and nothing to scale or put on a shopping list.

Boards are good at what Pinterest is good at, which is browsing and deciding what looks good. Treat a board as a wish list.

How to get the real recipe out of a pin

1. Open the pin and tap through to the website. Most food pins link to the recipe page on a blog or recipe site.
2. Check it is the right page. Some pins link to a home page or a round-up of twenty recipes. Find the recipe itself.
3. Save that page, not the pin, into a recipe app that keeps a copy. Recipe sites publish a structured version of each recipe for search engines, and a good app reads it directly, including ingredients, steps, servings and times.

Saving pins with Sugo

You can share either the pin or the page to Sugo, from the share sheet on iPhone, iPad or Android, or by pasting the link.

• Share the pin and Sugo reads the pin's description, along with the creator and image. Pin links from any regional Pinterest site work, and so do pin.it short links. If the pin holds a recipe in its description, that is enough.
• If the pin only names the dish, Sugo says so rather than guessing a recipe. Open the pin's source and share that page instead; that usually gets the full recipe.
• Share the source page and Sugo imports it like any recipe website, and keeps its own copy, so the recipe stays in your library even if the blog later disappears.

Once it is in, you can scale it, add the ingredients to a shopping list, and cook from it with the steps read aloud.

Questions people ask

How do I save a recipe from Pinterest?

Open the pin, tap through to the website it came from, and save that recipe page into a recipe app that keeps a copy. Saving the pin to a board only keeps a picture and a link.

Why do some Pinterest pins have no recipe?

Many pins are just a photo and a title that link to a website. The recipe is on that website, so you need to open the pin's source to get it.

Can I move my Pinterest recipe boards into a recipe app?

Pin by pin, by sharing each pin or its source page to the app. Pinterest boards do not export as recipes, because the recipes were never on Pinterest in the first place.

For other places recipes come from, see how to save recipes from TikTok and Instagram, from Facebook, or every way to import a recipe.