Drafting recipes with Olive

Olive can write a complete recipe from a short description, or suggest recipes built from ingredients you already stock. Olive uses your own ingredient list and prices wherever it can.

To start, go to My recipes → Create new recipe → Generate with Olive (AI).

Describe a dish

1. Stay on the Describe a dish tab.
2. Under What should Olive draft?, describe the meal. Good descriptions say:
   • what the dish is and how many people it should serve
   • the diet you're cooking for (vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free…)
   • any constraint (one pot, 30 minutes, no oven, budget-friendly)
3. Optional: click Add details (optional) to set Servings, Anything else, things to Avoid (your dietary restrictions) and a Meal category.
4. Click Draft the recipe.

Describing a dish for Olive

Olive usually takes a few seconds:

Olive drafting a recipe

Check the draft, then save

Olive shows the draft in an editor for you to check.

Olive's draft recipe, ready to check

• Estimated cost per recipe and per serving, from your existing prices, and how many ingredients have a price on file.
• Olive's notes on this draft: things worth knowing, such as allergy notes or prep tips.
• Recipe basics: name, servings and an optional photo.
• Ingredients: drag rows to reorder them. Ingredients marked NEW aren't in your ingredient list yet, and are added when you save. If Olive couldn't match a unit, the original wording appears under the row so you can pick the right unit.
• Instructions: one step per paragraph. Click Draft instructions with AI to have Olive rewrite them.
• Categories and tags: what the meal contains, meal category and tags.

When you're happy with the draft, click either:

• Save recipe: saves it to My recipes.
• Save & set costs: saves it and opens Ingredients, so you can price the new ingredients.

Click Start over to throw the draft away and describe something else.

The draft isn't saved until you click Save. If you leave the page first, the draft is lost.

Ideas from my ingredients

Not sure what to cook? Let Olive suggest recipes built around what you already have.

1. Click the Ideas from my ingredients tab.
2. Under Anything Olive should keep in mind?, describe what you need. For example: "use up 40 lb of potatoes, camp dinners, no oven".
3. Optional: under Add details (optional), choose How many ideas (up to 10), Servings, things to Avoid and a Meal category.
4. Click Ask Olive for ideas.

Asking Olive for recipe ideas

Each idea shows how easy it is, how many of its ingredients you already have, and what you'd need to buy. Click Draft this recipe on the one you like. Olive drafts it in full, and you check and save it as above.

Draft instructions for an existing recipe

Already have the ingredients but no method? In the recipe editor, click Draft instructions with AI. Olive writes step-by-step instructions from the ingredient rows.

Drafting instructions replaces whatever is in the instructions box. Copy anything you want to keep first.

Tips

• Olive only drafts food and drink recipes.
• The more specific you are about headcount, diet and equipment, the better the draft.
• Always check quantities and units. Olive drafts from a sentence, so treat the amounts as a starting point.

Video walkthrough

This video shows an earlier version of recipe drafting. The screens have been redesigned since, but the idea is the same.