We’re building a cooking app! It’s called Al Dente and we’re pretty excited about it.
Broadly speaking, the goal of Al Dente is to organize your cooking life. And, as I’ve learned from all of the people who have so generously allowed me to interview them on this topic, no two cooking lives are quite the same.
Cooking is such a fun space to explore because it’s both universal and highly individual at the same time. Everyone has to eat, everyday. Beyond that, the variables are basically endless:
Some people cook multiple times a day, while others avoid it at all costs
Some people cook exclusively from recipes, while others cook intuitively
Some people prioritize efficient cooking, while others cook as an artistic or creative pursuit
Some people are creatures (eaters?) of habit and others strive for variety
There are nutrition goals, dietary restrictions, household preferences, substitutions, budget considerations, seasonality, leftover potential and more.
Starting narrow
First and foremost, my goal is to create an app that I love to use and is valuable to me. It’s sort of a foreign concept, focusing so narrowly on my own priorities and preferences as user after almost a decade of working at a scaled megacorp designing for audiences of 150+ million. Which isn’t to say that I’m not refining and iterating on the app based on research and feedback from others. But it’s nice to be in the driver’s seat, deciding if something meets my own personal bar first.
Actually, it’s mostly nice. Sometimes, in an Ira Glass “taste vs. work gap” way, it’s kind of hellish because I’m out of my comfort zone in this 0-1 space. Onward!
So, if I’m the user, what are my pain points?
I enjoy cooking, but I don’t like meal planning or trying to figure out what to eat
It’s hard to remember all of the different meals and recipes in my cooking repertoire
I read a lot of food publications and follow my favorite chefs on social media, but their recipes are scattered across the Internet
I don’t cook from my cookbooks as often as I’d like
Collating the grocery list each week is a lot of admin work
Food tasks (meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking) are household duties that I share with my husband and details get lost in the shuffle when we handoff parts of the process to one another
I often tweak recipes to suit our household preferences or kitchen equipment, but it’s hard to track the changes and iterations over time
In addition to some of these “problems to be solved,” I also think there’s a lot of room to layer in interesting, well-crafted product experiences that make cooking more fun and joyful.
Where we are today
Not that far! We’ve barely scratched the surface of what we think is possible to explore. But, for the sake of documentation, I’ll capture what the app looks like for our household today as a milestone.
Library
Right now, the Library view is at the heart of the app. We really wanted to make this view feel like an accurate representation of the mental model people have when they think about their recipes, which often involves metadata like where the recipe came from or who wrote it. Users can also organize their recipes by grouping them into collections.
Organizing
Within each of those organizing lenses, there are detail pages that allow people to explore all of their recipes that fit a particular category. As you can see, our household loves both NYT Cooking and Kenji López-Alt.
Cookbooks
Cookbooks get a special detail page that showcase book specific information like the cover and subtitle.
Our hypothesis is that having digital representations of cookbook recipes sitting next to all of the other recipes we cook will encourage us to cook them more. Scanning the recipes into our library keeps them top of mind and discoverable, making it easier to incorporate them into our weekly meal plans and grocery lists.
Saving a recipe
There are quite a few ways to get recipes into your library, and the easiest one actually doesn’t even involve opening the app… it uses the built-in share sheets on iOS and Android. But, if people want to build out their library without ever leaving the app, they can add recipes via in-app search.
MCP
As tech nerds, we wanted to make sure we were building in an AI-native way from the start. We dogfood every feature we build in Al Dente as an MCP tool first, which allows us to explore the data model and use cases before we ever commit to building UI.
It’s also led to a lot of discussions about whether a feature actually needs UI or can just be handled by an agent. None of these discussions have resulted in decisions that are set in stone yet, but writing about our MCP-driven development process is definitely in the queue for a future post.
What’s still to come
There’s so much left to do. Some of the things coming sooner rather than later:
More ways to organize and interact with recipes
Grocery lists and meal plans
Onboarding and first time user experience
Household collaboration features
Visual design, branding and marketing site
Design system (!!)
We’ve taken some first passes and iterated on all of these items but none of them currently meet our internal bar. I hope to write about the process of working on all of them here over the next few months.
It’s still early, but if you’re curious to check it out, you can sign up for our waitlist here.
Lunch
This week for lunch, I made Ali Slagle’s Orzo Salad With Lentils and Zucchini from NYT Cooking.
See you next week!
Yessssss