50–57%
Bagels & Pretzels
Stiff, chewy, hand-rolled.
Recipes that actually work.
Cups and grams on every ingredient. Baker's hydration locked to the gram. Scale any recipe without the math. Six features, no fluff — the recipe vault a serious home cook would design, if a serious home cook also happened to ship native mobile software.
Every ingredient in ChefVault carries two values at all times. Toggle the whole recipe with a single tap. No on-the-fly conversion, no rounding drift, no "1.0567 cups" nonsense.
Most recipe apps store one unit and calculate the other when you ask. That sounds harmless until you realize that "1 cup of flour" can mean anywhere from 120 g to 156 g depending on whether you spooned or scooped, sifted or shook, and what kind of flour you bought. Multiply that error across five ingredients and you've baked a different recipe than the one you opened.
ChefVault stores both values, sourced from USDA reference data and King Arthur's published flour weights, and lets you choose which one is "primary" per recipe. Convert your grandma's handwritten card to grams without losing the cups. Save a King Arthur recipe in grams and still read it in cups when your kid wants to help.
Every time you add water, ChefVault recalculates your baker's percentage and tells you exactly where you land on the bagel-to-batter spectrum. No more "how do I know if this is ciabatta?" Yes, this is ciabatta. The math says so.
Hydration — the weight of your water as a percentage of your flour — is the single most useful number in bread baking and the one every home baker is forced to calculate by hand. Most apps don't expose it at all. ChefVault makes it a permanent heads-up display: change the water, watch the number move, see which named band you've crossed into.
The seven bands below are the same chart bread instructors have taped to their walls for thirty years. ChefVault simply puts it next to the recipe you're editing.
Stiff, chewy, hand-rolled.
The home-baker comfort zone.
The everyday boule.
Open crumb territory.
Slack, bubbly, bench-scraper.
The Tartine zone. Glossy.
Pancakes, crepes, popovers.
Scale a recipe up, down, sideways. ChefVault returns clean fractions — ¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔, ¾ — not "0.3333333 cup." Because no one measures 0.3333 of anything at 6 a.m.
Scaling is the most-used and most-broken feature in every recipe app. The naive approach multiplies every number by your scaling factor and prints whatever ugly decimal falls out. ChefVault scales weights linearly and then re-fits the volume display to the nearest sane fraction — ⅛, ¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔, ¾, ⅞ — so the cup readings stay measurable with the measuring spoons in your drawer.
Want a half batch? Tap. A 1.5x batch for the neighbors? Tap. A specific final dough weight? Set the target — say, 900 g — and ChefVault back-solves every ingredient in grams and rewrites the volumes to the nearest readable fraction.
Drop a link from NYT Cooking, Serious Eats, King Arthur, Smitten Kitchen, Sally's, your favorite Substack, whatever. ChefVault parses the JSON-LD, normalizes the units, and lands it in your vault — clean, structured, scaleable.
We support the major recipe schema (schema.org/Recipe) used by almost every food site published since 2014, plus heuristic fallbacks for hand-rolled sites and Substack-style blogs. The parser strips the ad copy, the "I grew up in a small town" opening paragraph, and the 800-word SEO preamble. What lands in your vault is just the recipe. Title, yield, ingredients, steps, source link, photo. Done.
Once it's imported, it's yours. Edit the ingredients. Add metric weights. Adjust the hydration. Annotate the steps with your own kitchen notes. Recipes scraped from the web are no different from recipes you typed yourself — they're just faster to start with.
Hit Cook Mode and the whole interface gets out of your way. One step at a time. Big type. Big buttons. No notifications. The screen never sleeps. Voice control optional.
Cook Mode is designed for the actual mechanics of cooking — the moment when you have a wooden spoon in one hand, oil on your fingertips, and no time to fumble for a passcode. ChefVault detects when you're in Cook Mode and locks the screen on, dims the chrome, bumps the ingredient type to 24 points, and shows you exactly the next step. Tap to advance, swipe to go back. Or just say "next."
Built-in step timers wake your phone if you walk away. Multi-pot recipes (the rare bread that ferments while the soup simmers) get parallel timer tracks. When you finish, ChefVault asks for one rating, saves the date you made it, and quietly logs it to your kitchen history.
Your vault lives on your device first. WatermelonDB powers a local-first database that reads and writes in milliseconds, then syncs to the cloud when you're connected — silently, in the background, conflict-free.
Almost every recipe app on the market is just a thin client for a slow server. Open the app on a flight, lose signal in a basement, hit a campsite with no bars and watch the spinner spin forever. ChefVault is built backwards: the entire database lives on your phone, and the cloud is just a backup and a sync target.
That means everything — search, edit, scale, cook mode, ingredient toggling — works at native speed whether you're on fiber, on cellular, or off the grid. Sync resolves conflicts using a last-write-wins policy with full revision history, so editing the same recipe on your phone and laptop won't lose your work.
The honest table. Other apps are great at what they do — ChefVault simply does the things serious cooks need that other apps don't.
| Feature | ChefVault | Paprika | Yummly | Cookpad |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dual measurements (cups + grams together) | Yes | No | Toggle only | No |
| Baker's hydration calculator | Yes — live | No | No | No |
| Smart fraction scaling | Yes — ⅛/⅓/½ | Decimal | Servings only | Servings only |
| Web URL recipe import | Yes | Yes | Curated only | No |
| Cook mode (screen stays awake) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited |
| Offline-first (works with no signal) | Yes — full | Yes | No | No |
| USDA-sourced gram weights | Yes | No | No | No |
| Dark professional UI by default | Yes | Theme | No | No |
| No ads, no tracking, no upsells | Yes | Yes | Ads | Ads |
| Cross-platform sync (iOS · Android · Web) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Recipe apps have been stuck for a decade. The category leaders ship the same shopping-list-plus-meal-planner combo every release cycle, while serious cooks — the people who actually care about a 2-gram swing in salt — have been quietly using Google Docs and a kitchen scale.
ChefVault is the recipe vault designed for those cooks first. Everyone else benefits — the smart fractions help a Tuesday roast chicken just as much as a Saturday brioche — but the principles are baked in for the serious end of the spectrum and never compromised down to the lowest common denominator.
Six features. One thesis. Recipes that actually work.
Get on the early-access list. Be among the first 1,000 in private beta. Receive the hydration cheat-sheet as a thank-you for trusting us before the press release.