Block

Recipes for people who cook.

A clean place to keep recipes, plan a week, and shop for it. No life stories. No popups. No upsell before the ingredients.

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Pasta · Rome

Serves 2 · 20 min

Pasta alla Carbonara

Ingredients

Spaghetti
½ lb
Guanciale diced
4 oz
Egg yolks
3
Whole egg
1
Pecorino Romano grated
½ cup
Black pepper fresh
to taste
Salt for water
1 tbsp

Method

  1. 01Boil salted water, drop pasta9 min
  2. 02Render guanciale, no oil5 min
  3. 03Whisk yolks, egg, pecorino, pepper1 min
  4. 04Toss pasta with guanciale, off heat·
  5. 05Add egg mix + splash pasta water1 min
  6. 06Serve, more pecorino on top·

Recipes are always free.

The magic that makes cooking easier is the part you pay for. If you ever do.

What Block is

Block is a recipe webapp for people who already know how to cook. The recipe sits at the top of the page. Ingredients are right-aligned so your eye can scan them. The method is terse. “Render guanciale, no oil.” You already know what cold rendering is.

There are two views of every recipe. Prep is the spec sheet you read before you cook, share with a friend, or print. Cook is the timeline you keep open at the stove. Every step laid out by elapsed time, ingredients pinned to the step that uses them, timers built in. One tap to switch.

Recipes live in a shared library that anyone can search. Paste a link, snap a photo of a cookbook page, paste raw recipe text, or just type a dish name. Block cleans it up and adds it to the library. Save anything worth coming back to into your own collection. Your notes are your own, even when the recipe isn’t.

Free vs. Block+

Always free

  • Every recipe, fully readable
  • Import from any URL, photo, or paste
  • Save to your collection, favorite, take notes
  • The Prep view and Cook view, with timers
  • Up to 3 recipes on your weekly menu
  • A shopping list with one store
  • No ads, ever

Block+ $4/mo · $36/yr

  • Plan more than 3 recipes a week
  • Share recipes, the weekly menu, and the shopping list with your household
  • Multi-store shopping lists, grouped by store and section
  • The Pantry Flip: tap an ingredient mid-cook to flag it low or out
  • Every free feature, with no caps

We will never put recipes behind a paywall. The recipes are the point. Block+ is for the workflow around them. One subscription covers your whole household.

How it works

01

Find a recipe

Search the library or add one. Paste a URL from a food blog or magazine site. Snap a photo of a cookbook page. Paste raw recipe text. Type a dish name and Block writes a clean canonical version. Either way it lands in your collection, ingredients right-aligned and the method short.

02

Plan a week

Open a recipe, pick the days. It lands on this week’s menu. The plan page shows the week at a glance with time per night, and the same recipe can sit on more than one day.

03

Shop for it

Every recipe on the week’s menu rolls into one shopping list, consolidated and grouped by store section. Share it with whoever’s actually going to the store. Items strike through as they’re bought.

04

Cook

Switch to Cook view. The recipe becomes a timeline with numbered steps and timers built in. Tap a timer to start it. Reaching for the olive oil and the bottle’s light? Tap the ingredient and flag it running low or out. It lands on the shopping list. Back to cooking.

What Block is not

Block doesn’t show ads. Block doesn’t autoplay video. Block doesn’t ask you to rate a recipe before you’ve cooked it. Block doesn’t have a 1,500-word memoir between you and the ingredients. Block doesn’t email you every Tuesday. Block doesn’t have a “Jump to Recipe” button because the recipe is already at the top.

If you’ve abandoned three recipe apps and a bookmarked folder of food blogs, this is for you.

A quiet FAQ

Why is the basic version free?
Recipes are culture. Charging for them feels wrong. We charge for the tools that make cooking easier: the weekly planner, household sharing, multi-store shopping, the pantry flip. Those are the things worth improving.
Where do the recipes come from?
From the people cooking with Block. Anyone can paste a URL and contribute. Once it’s in the library, it’s searchable by everyone. We don’t generate recipes, we don’t license a cookbook, and we don’t have a content team. The library is the community.
If recipes are shared, what’s mine?
Your saved collection, your notes on each recipe, your weekly plan, your shopping list, your pantry. The recipe text belongs to the library; everything wrapped around it belongs to you.