Help & guide

No link to hand? Discover is a curated set of recipes you can search and drop straight into a meal. Open Filters to narrow it by cuisine, meal, course, diet, food group, total or hands-on time, and rating. Pick as many as you like, and diets stack (choose vegan and gluten-free to see only dishes that are both). The same filters work on your saved recipes and when picking a dish for a meal. Save any of them to your own recipes to reuse later (saving needs an account); on your saved shelf and in your collections these are tagged From Expo, and the ones you brought in yourself are tagged Added, so you can tell them apart or show just one kind. Much of it comes from scanned family cookbooks, which keep more than dinner between their covers, so every page is checked to be a real recipe for food before it joins Discover: the playdough and the cold remedies stay out. A card that says 3 versions has other cooks' takes on the same dish, the original included. Open it to compare them.

Once you've saved a few recipes, group them into collections of your own, like “Weeknight dinners” or “Baking”: cookbooks you build yourself. Open any saved recipe (or use the folder button on its card) and tap Add to collection; a recipe can live in as many collections as you like. Deleting a collection only removes the label, never the recipes in it.

Only making one thing? On any recipe's page, tap Start cooking to go straight to its schedule and into cook mode, with no meal to build. Prefer Add to meal and Expo lays an empty place beside it for a side or dessert. Either way you can still set a serve time or scale before you start.

Add a course to any meal and tap the sparkle to have Expo pick a dish for it, from Discover or your own saved recipes. It chooses something that goes with what you've already got: the same cuisine, a different main ingredient, and, where it can, the oven at a temperature the rest of the meal is already using. Don't like it? Shuffle that one dish, or the whole lot, until it looks right. Shuffling everything only moves dishes Expo picked, so links you pasted stay put unless you swap them yourself.

Every dish lands at your serve time unless you say otherwise. Each row has a serve setting: leave it on “With the meal”, or send a dish out later, from a quick 20-minute gap up to any custom delay you type in. Set a row’s course to Dessert and it takes a 45-minute gap on its own; change or clear it whenever. Expo schedules the later dish around its own serving time, so it isn’t sitting warm for an hour, and cook mode won’t call you late for a dessert that’s bang on time.

Nailed a combination you'll cook again, or planning next week? On the New meal screen tap Save this meal to keep the whole table (every dish, its course and serve gap, and the servings) in your Saved meals. There's no serve time saved: you set that fresh each time, so the same roast works for a 1pm Sunday lunch or a 7pm dinner. Open one and tap Cook this meal and the whole thing drops back into the planner, ready to schedule. The dishes are kept as a snapshot, so a saved meal still cooks even if you later change or remove one of the recipes in it. Saving needs an account.

Set how many you're feeding and Expo scales the ingredients. Change it on any recipe's own page, or on the cook preview right before you start; your household size in settings prefills it. You can step in halves (2.5, for instance) rather than rounding to a whole number. When a recipe never stated how many it serves, Expo estimates it from the ingredient amounts and shows it with a “~”. Timings never change, so the schedule stays the same.

Your shopping list is built for a trolley: big rows to tick off one-handed, ticked things sink to the bottom, and Clear ticked tidies up at the till. Type anything in the box at the top and Expo reads the amount out of it, so “2 cups flour” lands as an amount, a unit and an ingredient. Tap Add a note under the box to add a short note, like which bag or who it's for. If you later add a meal that needs the same thing, Expo keeps your note and adds its own after it. To change a note, remove the line and add it again. Share sends the list to a message or your clipboard for whoever's actually going. Amounts in grams, kilograms, ounces, pounds, millilitres, litres, teaspoons and tablespoons are added and compared across units, so 200 g and 1 lb of butter is one line. Cups, cans and the like are never converted.

On the cook preview, under how many you're feeding, tap Add ingredients to shopping list. Expo adds up the same ingredient across every dish in the meal, so butter in two recipes is one line, and it uses the scaled amounts you actually plan to cook. The list adds only what your pantry doesn't cover: if you have 200 g of the 500 g a recipe needs, the line reads 300 g and the note says what you have. If the same thing is already on your list, unticked, Expo adds to that line instead of writing a second one. The line is then worked out for everything it's for, less what your pantry covers, and the note says how much you need in all. Usually the amount goes up; a line marked Have it can turn into an amount to buy. Lines you have ticked, and the restock lines from your pantry, are left as they are. A line it can't add up (“salt to taste”) still goes on the list as written, because a missing ingredient is worse than a vague one.

Track what you keep in at Pantry, grouped by cupboard, fridge and freezer, with a +/- stepper for counting as you use things. Fill it the quick way with Add from photos, or type items in one at a time. Give an item an always keep amount, and when you drop below it the rest goes on your shopping list by itself, marked Restock. Step it back up and the line follows; delete the line and it stays gone until the amount changes again. If one was already low before that, or you deleted its line, Add to list puts it on. Tick what you bought, then tap Clear ticked when you're home: each ticked Restock line goes back in your pantry. When you send a meal to the list, anything your pantry already covers is marked Have it rather than dropped, so you can still check the jar before you go.

Add from photos at the top of your pantry takes up to six photos: a fridge shelf, a freezer drawer, a cupboard, a spice rack. Expo reads them and drafts a list you check before anything is saved, with the amount, the unit and the shelf editable on every line, and a switch to leave one out. Something you already track updates that item rather than adding a second one. Expo counts what it can see, so a part-used bag comes back as one bag, not a guessed weight, and a label it can't read is left off rather than invented. Your photos are read once and dropped: they are never saved, never attached to your account, and never used for anything else.

Cook from your pantry (on your Pantry page, or in the account menu) reads what you have in and lists recipes from Discover and your saved recipes, fewest things to buy first. Each one says how many of its ingredients you have, what to buy, and what you're short of. Tap Add to list and only the missing and short amounts go on your shopping list. Expo matches by name, so open What you have to check it read your shelf right. Water, salt and black pepper always count as in.

Found a recipe you want to keep? Tap Add recipe (in the top bar, in the account menu, or from your saved recipes). Paste a link and Expo reads it, tags it and works out its timings, then saves it to your recipes. Or switch to Snap a photo to capture a recipe card or cookbook page, or pick a photo or screenshot you already have (up to four pages of the one recipe, printed or handwritten) and Expo reads it in the same way. If a page really holds two dishes off one ingredient list, like a mix box with a pancake method and a waffle method, Expo saves each as its own recipe. Once it's saved, you can rename it right there, and on the recipe's page anytime after (handy for turning “How to Cook Bacon in the Oven” into “Crispy Oven Bacon”). Photos are read once and never stored. Saving needs an account. To bring in a whole cookbook at once, use Import below.

Two different things in Settings. Your username is a unique @handle (like @paul) that credits you, for instance on a photo you add to a recipe; we give you one from your email when you sign up, and you can change it. Your display name is just a friendly label shown around Expo: optional, need not be unique, and blank until you set it.

Every recipe page has an Add a photo button, even when it already has one: a recipe can hold several, with one cover and the rest in a gallery below. On your own saved recipes your photos go on straight away, and you can pick which is the cover. On a recipe from Discover, your photo is sent to us first; once we've had a look it joins the recipe for everyone, credited to you. Cooked something and got a good shot? That's the way to share it. Adding a photo needs an account. To browse only recipes that have a picture, turn on Has a photo in the Discover filters.

Got a recipe of your own worth sharing? Open one of your saved recipes and tap Publish to Discover to add it where every Expo cook can find it. You confirm it's yours to share and grant us a licence to publish it, then it goes live right away, credited to your @handle. Expo lightly rewords the method into neutral wording (your ingredients stay exactly as written), and if you added your own photo it's shown with your credit; a photo from another website isn't published. Publishing needs an account.

Already keep recipes in another app? Open Import from your saved recipes and drop in an export file: a Paprika backup, a Mealie export, or a schema.org / JSON recipe file. Most apps have an Export or Backup option that writes one. Expo reads the whole file at once and gives every recipe its timing and dish tags on the way in, so they're ready to schedule like anything else. Before you import, you can rename any recipe in the list, so a long headline goes in as the name you'd actually call it. Importing saves to your recipes, so it needs an account.

Every time Expo shows (on a recipe, in Discover, across the schedule) is paced to you. Set how fast you cook in Settings and the hands-on steps stretch or tighten to suit; the oven and the resting never change. As you cook, Expo times your real steps and leans on those instead of the guess, so the estimates get truer the more you use it. Change your pace and every screen updates at once.

Expo signs you in by magic link or Google, so you may never have set a password. If you'd rather sign in with one, open Settings, find Password, and set one (at least 8 characters). Expo won't accept a password that has shown up in a known data leak. If yours has, choose a different one, and change it anywhere else you use it. The same place changes a password you already have. Magic link and Google keep working either way.

Settings shape the plan: a second oven stops oven-temp clashes, a default serve time prefills new meals, and dietary flags warn you early.

With your hands in the food, cook mode can speak its cues like turn-by-turn navigation: which dish, what's next, when a dish is done, a two-minute warning on long steps, a heads-up before a dish starts, and a word if the meal slips behind. It's off until you want it: tap the Voice button in the cook mode header to turn it on, and your choice is remembered next time. It uses your phone's built-in voice and works offline. On iPhone, the ringer switch has to be on for it to be heard.

Hold the big microphone button at the bottom of cook mode and say what's happening. Emergencies are heard instantly, on the phone itself, even with no signal: “someone's at the door”, “it's boiling over”, “fire alarm”, “pause everything”. Anything else goes to Sous, who knows what's on every hob and how the timing is going, and can answer a question or act on it: hold a dish, give it five more minutes, tick a step off, or tell you what you should be doing right now. Sous replies on screen, and out loud too when you've turned the voice on. Tap the X on the reply to clear it. It needs the microphone, and on some phones a connection; when it can't hear you it says so and the buttons carry on doing everything.

On the Preview step, set Who's cooking to Two of us. Expo lets two hands-on jobs run at once, so dishes start later and wait less before serving. It remembers your choice on this device.

Cook for more people than a recipe serves and its oven, stovetop, microwave and chilling times stretch to suit, by up to 60%. The new time shows beside the recipe's own, in amber, because it's a rule of thumb: check the dish is done before it comes out. Resting and rising times don't change, and a smaller batch keeps the recipe's times.

Open one of your saved recipes and tap Edit steps, next to Method. Change a step's minutes, whether it's hands on or unattended, its equipment or oven temperature, or add, remove and reorder steps. Expo uses your times as written from the next meal on. Saved meals keep the copy they were saved with.

Prop a tablet on a stand, turned sideways, and cook mode lays every dish out side by side with the clocks big enough to read across the kitchen. Each dish keeps one big button for its next move, and the emergency buttons and the talk button sit along the bottom edge. Turn it upright and you get the phone layout. A laptop window works the same way.

When every dish in cook mode is done, a card asks how it went. Rate each dish, add a photo or a note, say whether you'd cook it again, and tap Save to my cook log. If you leave cook mode without saving, Expo asks once more on the home page, about an hour after the meal was served: tap the stars and Save rating, or tap Skip and that meal won't come up again. It only asks about a meal you ticked a step off in, for up to three days, and only on the device you cooked on. Your notes and photos are just for you, and a recipe you've cooked shows how many times you've made it and how you rated it. Your rating of a Discover recipe or a published version, or of your saved copy of one, also counts toward the average other cooks see, without your name on it. The cook log needs an account.

Expo is a PWA, so you can add it to your home screen. On Android and Chrome, open the browser menu and choose Install (or Add to Home Screen); on iPhone, tap Share then Add to Home Screen. Either way you get a full-screen, offline-friendly kitchen companion. Pages you've already opened keep working with no signal; a page you've never visited shows a friendly offline screen instead of a browser error, and that screen opens the page by itself when the signal comes back.

Step alerts work with your phone locked. Tap Enable alerts in cook mode, and each step's alert goes off on time with the screen off or Expo in the background. If you turned alerts off, switch them back on in Settings, under Notifications, then Expo. With the ringer switch off, alerts vibrate without a sound.If your iPhone closes Expo while you cook, the alerts you already had still go off on time. Tap one, or open Expo, and cook mode comes back where you left it, with every clock still right. In a browser, reload the page and tap Resume cooking. Done with that meal? Tap End cooking instead.If a Focus is on, add Expo to its allowed apps so step alerts come through.In the app, sign in with an email link or a password. Open the link on this iPhone and Expo opens signed in. Google sign-in is on the website only. If you open Expo with no signal, you see a You're offline screen. It opens Expo by itself as soon as you're back online, or tap Try again. iOS asks to use the camera the first time you snap a photo, and the microphone the first time you hold the talk button in cook mode. If you said no, turn them back on in Settings, under Privacy & Security, then Camera or Microphone.

Two different labels. “by Mom” is who wrote the recipe (the author, credited from the source). “From Sous” is how it reached your meal: Sous is our in-house curator who keeps recipes on hand. One credits the cook; the other tells you where Expo found it.

Some Discover recipes are variations: a frosting that starts from a plainer one, a casserole that builds on a cream sauce. Where the original just said “prepare the base recipe, then…”, Expo folds those steps in so the dish is complete and timed on its own. A From … heading marks the borrowed steps and links to the recipe they came from.

Cooked a recipe your own way? Tap Tweak this recipe on its page, edit the ingredients and steps, say what you changed, and publish it as a new version. Every version of a dish is listed together under Versions, ranked by how the cooks who made it rated it, so the best rise to the top. Ratings only come from people who actually cooked and rated a dish, so the order is earned, not gamed. Open any version to Save this version into your own recipes, cook it, and file it into a collection. Found the one you'll keep cooking? Tap Make this my version in its Versions list. It saves a copy if you haven't yet, marks it Your version at the top of the list, and every other version of the dish links you back to it. Tap Stop using this version to clear it. Versions go live straight away; if one looks wrong, use Report and we'll take a look. Publishing, saving and picking your version need an account.