Prep Slate — a recipe app for home cooks
Your cookbook, ready when the stove is on.
Save recipes, plan the week, cook without scrolling or squinting.
The whole loop, not just the kitchen
The problem
You have been
here before.
Step 3, hands wet, the screen goes dark.
→The screen stays lit start to finish. You never touch it with raw-chicken hands.
You check the ingredients, come back, and your place is gone.
→Progress is saved as you go. Switch tabs, reload, lock the phone, and you are still on step 4.
Double the recipe and the app asks for 0.66 of an egg.
→Scaling rounds to what a kitchen actually uses: 3 eggs, ¾ cup, not a decimal.
Two hundred recipes saved, and the one you want is somewhere in folder seven.
→Search every ingredient and note, not just titles. Type "chicken," cook in ten seconds.
Cook mode
Cook mode came first. The rest of the app grew around it.
Every decision on this screen answers something that goes wrong when your hands are full.
- The screen never sleeps
- A wake lock holds it lit from the first step to the last, so you are never prodding a dark phone with raw-chicken hands.
- Ingredients follow the step
- Advance, and the ingredient that step calls for rises to the top of the list and lights up. A twenty-line list stops being something you scroll through with a knife in your hand.
- Your place lives on the server
- Lock the phone, reload the tab, carry on from the iPad. You are still on step 4, with the same things crossed off.
- Timers keep counting
- One per step, still running when you switch tabs, and on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island on iPhone.
- The list is a tap away
- Run out of paprika at step 3 and it goes on the shopping list without leaving the step you are on.
- It listens when you ask it to
- Tap the microphone in the iPhone app and “Hey Prep, next” moves the step on. Back, a timer on the step you are on, and quiet when it goes off, all without wiping your hands first.
A note from
the maker
I am a home cook, not a chef. I cook most nights, I save recipes from all over, and for years I used the same apps everyone else does. They were good apps. I just had opinions.
I wanted the screen to stay lit at step three, with chicken on my hands. I wanted to check the ingredients without losing my place. I wanted to double a recipe without being handed two-thirds of an egg. None of that is a knock on anyone else's cook mode. I just knew exactly how I wanted mine to work, and I wanted it to be beautiful.
So I built the tool I wanted on the counter: one that stays out of the way while you cook. The screen stays lit. Your place is saved. The math is the math a cook would actually do. And your recipes are yours to take with you, always, even if you leave.
That is the whole idea. If it earns a place next to your stove, it has done its job.
Mark
Home cook, maker of Prep Slate
A library that scales
Past 50 saves, every folder app turns into a graveyard.
Smart tags apply themselves on import. Search reaches ingredients, tags, and notes, not just titles.
Plan
The plan knows when to start.
Tell it when you want to eat. It walks the timeline back: pre-prep at 4:45, prep everything else at 5:05, on the stove at 5:15.
Shop
The shopping list adds itself up.
Push a recipe to the list and every ingredient merges in, totaled and deduplicated. Two onions become one line, sorted into the aisle where you will find it. Each line remembers which recipes it came from. Check off as you walk the store.
At the desk, too
The Prep Slate promise
Your recipes are yours.
Exportable any time, even after you cancel.
Take it all with you
Download your whole library as one open file (JSON). Yours to keep.
Print any recipe
Every recipe prints clean, or saves as a PDF. Counter-ready, no app chrome.
No lock-in
Cancel and your library stays readable. The data is yours.
No ads inside a recipe. No social feed. No upsells mid-sear.