🍋 Drizzlelemons

New: Cook Mode — Follow Recipes Step by Step with Built-in Timers

April 2026

There is a strange disconnect in recipe apps. They are brilliant at helping you find recipes — search, save, organise, scale. But the moment you actually start cooking, they fall apart. Your phone locks after thirty seconds and you are tapping the screen with a flour-covered knuckle. The text is tiny, so you are squinting at a wall of instructions while something is about to boil over. You need to scroll back up to check how much cumin you were supposed to add. And when the recipe says "simmer for 15 minutes," you have to switch to a completely separate timer app, type in the time, and hope you remember which step it was for.

We have been thinking about this problem for a while. Drizzlelemons already strips away the ads and life stories from recipes — but once you are standing at the hob, even a clean recipe page is not really designed for cooking. You are still scrolling, still pinching to zoom, still juggling between apps for your kitchen timer.

Today we are shipping the feature that fixes all of this. Cook Mode is a dedicated step-by-step recipe view built specifically for the moment you are actually at the stove with your hands full. Large text, swipe navigation, automatic countdown timers, and per-step ingredient display — all in one full-screen cooking mode app experience that keeps your screen awake and gets out of your way.

What Cook Mode Does

Cook Mode transforms any recipe on Drizzlelemons into a focused, full-screen step-by-step cooking interface. Instead of seeing the entire recipe as one long page, each method step is presented individually with large, readable text. You move through the steps by swiping left and right or tapping navigation buttons — no scrolling required.

But it goes further than just showing one step at a time. Cook Mode also:

  • Detects times in your recipe text and turns them into one-tap countdown timers. If a step says "roast for 25 minutes," you will see a timer button ready to go.
  • Shows the ingredients you need for each step, pulled directly from the recipe and matched to the current instruction. No more scrolling back to the top to check quantities.
  • Keeps your screen awake automatically so your phone never locks mid-recipe. You do not need to change any settings — Cook Mode enables the wake lock for you.
  • Supports dark mode so you can cook in a dimly lit kitchen without a blinding white screen.
  • Tracks your progress with a simple step counter (e.g., "Step 3 of 8") so you always know where you are in the recipe.

Think of it as a recipe reader that is purpose-built for hands-free recipe use at the stove. It is not a replacement for the full recipe page — that is still there for reading, scaling, and sharing. Cook Mode is what you switch to when you are done prepping and ready to cook.

How It Works

Getting into Cook Mode takes exactly one tap. Here is the full flow:

  1. Open any recipe on Drizzlelemons — whether it is one you have saved, a public recipe shared by link, or one you have just converted. Cook Mode works on all of them.
  2. Tap the Cook Mode button. You will find it alongside the existing Copy, Share, and Print buttons at the top of the recipe page. It is hard to miss — it has a play icon and is labelled clearly.
  3. Start cooking. The screen transitions to the step-by-step recipe view. You will see the first method step in large text, with any relevant ingredients displayed below it. A progress bar at the top shows how far through the recipe you are.
  4. Navigate between steps by swiping left or right on the screen, or by tapping the large Previous and Next buttons at the bottom. On desktop, you can also use arrow keys.
  5. Start timers whenever you see a highlighted time in a step. Tap it once and the cooking timer begins counting down. A notification sound plays when time is up.
  6. Exit Cook Mode at any time by tapping the X button in the top corner. You will be taken back to the full recipe page exactly where you left off.

There is no setup, no configuration, and no tutorial. If you can swipe on your phone, you can use Cook Mode. We deliberately kept the interface minimal so there is nothing to learn and nothing to get wrong when you are in the middle of cooking.

Built-in Countdown Timers

This is the feature we are most excited about. Cook Mode scans every step of your recipe and automatically detects any reference to time — "simmer for 15 minutes," "bake for 45 minutes," "rest for 5 minutes," "let it sit for 1 hour." When it finds a time reference, it creates a recipe timer button directly inline with the text.

Tap the button and a countdown begins immediately. The cooking timer is displayed prominently on the current step so you can see it counting down while you work. Here is what makes it genuinely useful compared to opening a separate timer app:

  • Context-aware. Each kitchen timer is attached to the specific step that created it. You do not need to remember which timer corresponds to which instruction — it is right there in the step.
  • Multiple simultaneous timers. Real cooking often involves running multiple things at once. You might have something in the oven and something on the hob with different cook times. Cook Mode handles this — you can start timers on different steps and they all run independently. A small badge shows how many timers are currently active.
  • Audio notification. When a timer finishes, Cook Mode plays an audio alert. This works even if you have navigated to a different step, so you do not need to stay on the timer step and watch it count down.
  • Persistent across steps. If you start a timer on step 3 and then swipe forward to step 5, the timer keeps running. Swipe back to step 3 and you will see the remaining time. You never lose track of a running timer.
  • Manual adjustment. Occasionally the auto-detected time might not be exactly what you want. You can tap to adjust the timer duration before starting it — useful if you know your oven runs hot and you want to shave off a couple of minutes.

The time detection is smart about parsing natural language. It handles minutes, hours, and combinations like "1 hour and 30 minutes." It also ignores things that are not cooking times — if a step says "this recipe serves 4," it will not try to create a four-minute timer.

We think the built-in cooking timer alone makes Cook Mode worth using. No more fumbling with a separate app, no more forgetting which timer is for what, and no more accidentally clearing your timer when you switch back to the recipe.

Ingredients at a Glance

One of the most common complaints about following recipes on a phone is the constant scrolling between the method and the ingredient list. You are on step 4, it says "add the stock and cream," and now you need to scroll all the way back up to check whether it was 200ml or 300ml of stock and single or double cream.

Cook Mode solves this with per-step ingredient matching. When you view a step, the relevant ingredients are displayed directly below the instruction text. If step 3 says "add the onion, garlic, and ginger," you will see those three ingredients listed with their exact quantities — and nothing else.

This matching is done automatically by analysing the text of each method step against the recipe's ingredient list. It picks up on ingredient names, common abbreviations, and even partial matches (if the recipe says "add the aromatics" and the ingredients include garlic, ginger, and lemongrass, those will be shown).

Crucially, the quantities shown respect your current serving size. If you have scaled the recipe from 4 servings to 6 on the main recipe page, Cook Mode uses the scaled quantities. So if the original recipe called for 200g of chicken and you are cooking for six instead of four, Cook Mode shows 300g. The scaling engine that already powers Drizzlelemons' serving size adjuster does the maths — Cook Mode just displays the result in the right place at the right time.

Designed for the Kitchen

We did not just take the existing recipe page and make the text bigger. Cook Mode was designed from scratch for the specific constraints of using a phone while cooking. Every design decision was shaped by one question: can you use this with wet, messy hands?

Here is what that looks like in practice:

  • Large text throughout. The step instructions use a significantly larger font size than the normal recipe page. You should be able to read the current step from a reasonable distance — propped up on a kitchen counter, not held six inches from your face.
  • Big tap targets. Every interactive element — the Next and Previous buttons, timer start buttons, the close button — has a minimum touch target of 56 pixels. That is well above the recommended 48-pixel minimum and means you can reliably hit the right button with a knuckle, a thumb, or the back of your hand.
  • Screen wake lock. Cook Mode automatically enables the Screen Wake Lock API when available, preventing your device from sleeping. No more tapping the screen every 30 seconds to keep it awake. When you exit Cook Mode, the wake lock is released so your battery is not drained unnecessarily.
  • Swipe navigation. The primary way to move between steps is a horizontal swipe — left for next, right for previous. This is the most natural gesture on a phone and requires the least precision. Even if your hands are covered in dough, you can swipe with the side of your wrist.
  • Dark mode support. If you have Drizzlelemons set to dark mode, Cook Mode follows suit. This is particularly useful for evening cooking when you do not want your phone blasting a white screen across the kitchen. The contrast is tuned so text remains highly readable in both modes.
  • Minimal chrome. The interface in Cook Mode strips away everything that is not essential for the current moment of cooking. No navigation bar, no sidebar, no footer, no ads (Drizzlelemons never has ads anyway, but it bears repeating). Just the step, the ingredients, and your timers.

We also tested Cook Mode on a range of devices — small phones, large phones, tablets, and desktop browsers. The layout adapts appropriately: on phones it is a single column optimised for one-handed use, on tablets and desktops the text is even larger and the step content has more breathing room. Regardless of device, the step-by-step recipe view keeps the focus squarely on what you are doing right now.

Works with Every Recipe

Cook Mode is not a premium feature and it does not require any extra setup. It works automatically on every recipe in Drizzlelemons:

  • Saved recipes. Any recipe in your personal collection has Cook Mode available immediately.
  • Public shared recipes. If someone sends you a Drizzlelemons recipe link, you can use Cook Mode on it without even having an account.
  • Freshly converted recipes. Just pasted a URL and converted a recipe? Cook Mode is ready the moment the recipe loads.
  • Scaled recipes. If you have adjusted the serving size on the recipe page, Cook Mode picks up the scaled quantities automatically. Cook for 2 or cook for 12 — the ingredients shown per step will always reflect your chosen serving size.

There is no subscription required, no lemon cost, and no limit on how many times you can use it. If you can see a recipe on Drizzlelemons, you can use Cook Mode on it. We believe that once you have converted a recipe, every tool you need to actually cook it should be free and frictionless.

This philosophy extends to the Smart Shopping List we shipped recently as well. Together, the shopping list and Cook Mode form a complete workflow: find a recipe, add it to your shopping list, buy the ingredients, and then cook step by step with built-in timers. No other recipe app or recipe converter gives you all of that for free, with no ads.

What's Next

Cook Mode in its current form is already the best way to follow a recipe on your phone, but we have plenty of ideas for where to take it. We are exploring voice control so you can say "next step" without touching your phone at all — true hands-free recipe navigation. We are also looking at the possibility of adding step-level photos or short video clips for key techniques, so you can see exactly what "fold gently" or "golden brown" looks like. And we want to build a completion screen that lets you rate the recipe, add notes, and jump straight to saving it or sharing it with friends.

As always, we build based on what our users tell us matters. If there is something you would love to see in Cook Mode, we are all ears.

Ready to try it? Head to drizzlelemons.com/cook-mode to learn more, or open any recipe on Drizzlelemons and tap the Cook Mode button to jump straight in. If you are new here, it takes ten seconds to sign up and you get ten free recipe conversions to start building your collection.