We got tired of recipes that did not work

So we picked the two hundred dishes people search for most — the pizza, the carbonara, the tikka masala, the pad thai — and cooked each one until we understood it. Not until it worked once. Until we could say exactly which step was load-bearing and which was inherited habit.

What makes a recipe good enough for the Vault

Every recipe here has been through the same process, and it takes about a fortnight per dish.

• Research first. We read the canonical versions, the regional arguments and the primary sources. For Roman carbonara that means Italian cookbooks, not American blogs.
• Three rounds minimum. One to establish a baseline, one to break it deliberately, one to fix what broke. If a step survives round two, it stays.
• Explain the mechanism. Every recipe carries a Why This Recipe Works section. If we cannot say what a step does chemically or physically, we look harder — or we cut it.
• Written for a real kitchen. Domestic ovens, one pan, no blast chiller. Where professional equipment genuinely helps, we say so and give the workaround.
• Weights, not cups. Baking especially. Volume measures are the leading cause of a recipe failing for reasons nobody can diagnose.

Where our photographs come from

Every image on this site is public domain or CC0 licensed, sourced from Wikimedia Commons and Openverse and credited individually in our attribution file. Where we could not find a properly licensed photograph of a dish, you will see a warm gradient card with the recipe name instead — we would rather show you nothing than show you someone else's photograph without permission.

How to use the site

• Adjustable servings. Every ingredient list scales. Press the plus and minus buttons and the quantities recalculate, rounding sensibly rather than giving you 1.33 eggs.
• Cook Mode. Enlarges the type, hides everything that is not the method, keeps your screen awake and highlights the step you are on. Arrow keys move between steps.
• Inline timers. Where a step has a duration, there is a button to start a timer for it. It will chime and buzz when it finishes.
• Saved recipes. The heart icon saves anything to your favourites, stored in your browser. No account, no email, no tracking.
• Print properly. The print button produces a clean recipe card with no navigation, no photographs bleeding ink and no advertisements.

Attribution and licensing

The full list of image sources, photographers and licences lives in images-attribution.md in the project repository. Recipe text is our own. If you would like to reproduce a recipe, please link back rather than copying wholesale.