Savvy is where the recipes you actually cook live.
Hand it a link, a video, a photograph of a page. You get back the recipe — in your measurements, by weight, scaled, ready to cook. I’m Brent Marsh, and I built it because I could never make a good batch of hot cross buns twice.
Every Easter, I started over.
I grew up in New Zealand, where Easter tastes like hot cross buns, and every Easter since I’ve made a batch from a different recipe. I could never find last year’s recipe when Easter came round again.
I tried saving the link. Lost it. I tried saving the file. Lost that too. So I started writing notes, and the notes turned out to be the worst of the three, because twelve months later I couldn’t tell what my own note meant.
Photograph
A recipe page from an earlier Easter, with the note scratched in the margin in my own hand — “Add more raisins next year.” Reserved at its shipping size: the photograph is what has to ship, because a typeset quote reads as decoration and this page reads as evidence.
It could mean
Last year’s batch was thin on raisins. Put more in this time.
Or it could mean
I already put more in. Check next year whether it worked.
Two readings, and no way to tell which one I’d meant. Some years the buns were good, some years not, and none of it added up. A year on, the only thing that survives is what you wrote down — and mine was useless.
It was never just the buns. There was a butter chicken video I loved. Every time I wanted it again I’d click back through YouTube, hunting for it. And I’d find one. I think it was the one. Maybe. I could never tell.
Cooking is hard. Recipes shouldn’t be. That’s what Savvy was built around. A recipe and a cook are two separate records in it. The recipe is what it says now. A cook is one attempt — what you changed, and how it came out. Keep those apart and a note never needs decoding again. A year later you can see exactly what you did, and exactly what you thought of it.
Photograph
This year’s buns, in my kitchen. Reserved — the real photograph ships with the page, and a stock image here would defeat the point of the page.
One archive, whatever shape the recipe arrived in.
Bring a recipe in however you have it
A link, a video, a photograph of a page, a wall of pasted text, an export from another app. Nothing gets retyped.
The recipe comes back in your measurements
Metric or imperial, by weight wherever there is a weight, scaled to what you’re making rather than to what the author made.
Savvy works out each recipe’s numbers
Hydration, ratios, percentages, from the recipe you handed over. You never type a formula in. They’re never hidden from you either.
A home cook built this, for home cooks.
I cook constantly, and always have. I’ve lived in a dozen countries, and every one of them took something away from me when I left. I learned to bake bread in Mexico, where I couldn’t buy a decent rustic loaf. I learned to make cheese in Thailand, where the feta wasn’t worth eating. Japan showed me cakes so precise they looked machined, and I’ve been chasing perfection ever since.
It is always the same shape. I wanted something I couldn’t buy, so I learned to make it. Savvy is that habit, pointed at something other than food.
Cooking well comes down to the details, the numbers, and having the right thing in front of you at the moment you need it. That sits behind everything strict about Savvy: why it insists on weight, why it records where a recipe came from, why it won’t let you lose what you worked out last time.
AI does the coding. A cook makes the decisions. I use AI to write the software. But nothing here was decided at a keyboard. It was decided at a bench, and changed whenever it didn’t survive a real cook. And the numbers aren’t AI at all: hydration and ratios are arithmetic, computed from your own recipe, so every figure Savvy shows you is worked out rather than guessed.
I’m one person.
Your archive is yours, and it stays that way.
Take the whole thing out whenever you like, in one plain file other software can read, at any size and on any plan. No recipe you wrote is ever hidden from you — stop paying and you can still read, search and cook from every one of them. What a plan buys is adding to the archive, never reaching it. And nothing gets lost — losing someone’s cooking is the one failure this product doesn’t get to have.
How export worksTell me how you cook.
I read every message. If something in Savvy doesn’t fit the way you work, tell me — we all cook differently, and a good part of what’s in the app is there because a cook took the time to say so.