why this site exists
How PinThisRecipe works
Most recipe sites will tell you a dish has 4.8 stars. None of them will show you what it looked like when somebody other than the author made it.
Here, every review carries a photo of the dish as it actually came out of that cook's kitchen, plus straight answers about whether the timing held up and whether it needed more salt. You get to see what you are really signing up for before you shop for it.
What being a member looks like
Find a recipe you can trust
Reviews here are photo-backed, so you can look at five other people's results before you commit an evening to one. Once a recipe has 3 or more approved report cards, its Cook Report sums up what everybody found — whether the stated cook time was accurate, whether it was harder than it looked, and how many would make it again.
Pin it to your week
Saving a recipe here means planning to cook it. Pin it to any day in a 7-day window that starts today, or drop it in the Someday lane when you want to keep it without committing to a date. It is a meal plan, not a pile of bookmarks you will never open again.
Cook it, then file a report card
After you cook it, tell the next person what happened: how it turned out, whether the timing was right, how hard it was, how the seasoning landed, and whether you would make it again. Add your substitutions if you made any, and a photo of your dish.
It takes about a minute. You can post up to 4 a day, and you cannot review your own recipe.
Keep what worked
Answer “yes, I'd make it again” and you are offered the clip on the spot; take it and the recipe goes into your cookbook with your own substitutions saved alongside it. There is no other way in — every entry is something you actually cooked, which is what makes it worth more than a bookmark folder.
Your cookbook is private until you decide to publish it. Once you do, it lives at a link you can share.
Share your own recipes
While you are new, an editor reads your submission before it goes public — that queue is the reason this site is worth cooking from. Once you have earned the site's trust, which usually means reaching Trusted at 10 points with an approved recipe behind you, what you submit publishes straight away.
Drafts save as you go, up to 3 at a time. A draft you have not touched in 90 days is deleted, along with any photo you uploaded to it.
Points and levels
Points measure what you have put in. You earn 5 when a recipe of yours is approved, 1 each time another cook keeps one of your recipes in their cookbook — which only happens once they have cooked it and said they would make it again — and 5 when a cook you invited gets their first recipe approved.
Those points put you on a ladder: Cook to start, Contributor at 5, Trusted at 10, Partner at 15, and Featured at 20. Contributor unlocks your invite link, Trusted lets your recipes publish without waiting on an editor and adds a storefront link to your public cookbook, Partner lets you put up to 4 of your own links on each recipe you publish, and Featured raises that to 8 and makes you eligible to be featured on the homepage.
Your level is calculated from your points every time it is shown, so it never lags behind what you have earned.
Inviting other cooks
Your invite link unlocks at Contributor, 5 points in, so a brand-new account does not have one yet. Once it appears on your account page, anybody who signs up through it and gets their first recipe approved earns you 5 points. It pays on that first approval rather than at signup, because the point is to bring in cooks who cook.
All of it is free. Nothing on this site costs you money — not joining, not submitting a recipe, not reviewing one.