Getting Started

Welcome to Skillet. Here's how to go from sign-up to your first versioned recipe in a few minutes.

Table of Contents

• Create Your Account
• Your Workspace
• Create a Recipe
• Understand Versions
• Log a Cook
• Try AI Features
• Next Steps

Create Your Account

1. Go to https://skillet.studio and click Get Started
2. Sign up with your email and a password, or use Sign in with Google
3. Choose a display name — this appears on shared recipes and within the app

That's it. No credit card, no trial period.

Your Workspace

After signing in, you land in your recipe workspace. This is the center of Skillet — everything branches from here.

The left sidebar gives you access to:

• Recipes — your full collection, searchable and filterable
• Cook Log — a chronological record of every cook you've logged
• Skills — techniques you're practicing
• Journeys — structured learning paths through a cuisine or method
• Menus — planned meals and events

Create a Recipe

Click New Recipe in the top-right corner. You have three starting points:

From Scratch

Write your recipe directly. Add a title, list your ingredients with quantities, write your steps, and include any notes. This is the most hands-on approach.

With AI

Describe what you want to make — as simple as "a weeknight chicken thigh dish with lemon and herbs" or as specific as "a Sichuan mapo tofu, medium heat, no pork." AI generates a complete structured draft with ingredients, steps, and notes. Review it, adjust it, save it.

AI drafts are starting points. They're often good, sometimes surprising, and occasionally wrong. That's why they're drafts.

Import

Have a recipe from a blog, a family email, or your own notes? Paste the text. AI parses it into Skillet's structured format — ingredients broken out with quantities, steps numbered, metadata extracted. Clean up anything it missed, then save.

Understand Versions

This is the heart of Skillet. Every time you make meaningful changes to a recipe and save, a new version is created. Your version history shows:

• What changed — ingredients added or removed, steps rewritten, notes updated
• When it changed — timestamps for each version
• Why it changed — optional version notes (e.g., "Swapped butter for olive oil," "Increased oven temp after last cook")

You can compare any two versions side by side and revert to an earlier one if an experiment doesn't pan out.

Think of it as track changes for your cooking.

Log a Cook

After you've actually made the recipe, log the session:

1. Open the recipe and click Log Cook
2. Rate the outcome — how did it turn out overall?
3. Add session notes — what worked, what didn't, what you'd change
4. Annotate individual steps — add real-time notes to specific steps (e.g., "Needed 2 extra minutes at step 4")
5. Save — your cook log is now part of the recipe's history

Over time, cook logs become the most valuable part of your recipe. They're the difference between a recipe you saved and a recipe you've mastered.

Try AI Features

Once you have a recipe, you can use AI to refine it:

• Refine — "Make this simpler for a weeknight" or "Suggest a substitution for heavy cream"
• Explore — "What if I made this with lamb instead?" or "Give me a vegetarian version"
• Scale — "Adjust for 8 servings instead of 4"

AI suggestions become new content you can choose to incorporate into your next version. You're always in control of what stays.

Remember: AI is a creative tool, not a food safety authority. Verify temperatures, check for allergens, and use your own judgment.

Next Steps

You're set up. Here are some things to try:

• Import a favorite recipe from your notes or a website
• Set your preferred units (Imperial or Metric) in Settings
• Plan a menu for your next dinner — link courses to your recipes
• Start a Culinary Journey to practice a new cuisine or technique
• Read the Features guide for a full tour of everything Skillet can do