Your Recipe Box

Your Recipe Box is where every recipe you save on Vinst lives — a photo of a handwritten card, a link from your favorite food blog, or something you typed up yourself. This guide covers finding recipes again later and keeping things tidy. Not sure how to get a recipe in there in the first place? Start with Adding a Recipe to Your Recipe Box.

What you'll need

A Vinst account, with at least one recipe already saved
A couple of minutes

📱 Using Vinst on your phone? Everything below works the same way — you'll just find the menu behind the ☰ icon instead of a sidebar, and pop-ups open as full screens instead of small centered windows.

The basics, at a glance

Browse, search & filter — find what you're looking for by name, category, or favorites
Keep it tidy — delete recipes you don't need anymore
Send recipes onward — add them to a Collection or a Cookbook whenever you're ready

Step 1: Browse, search & filter your recipes

Every recipe you've saved shows up under "All recipes." From here you can:

Search by name, ingredient, or source.
Filter by category — Meal types, Main ingredients, Dietary restrictions, Cuisine, or Prep time. Click a category to see its options, and pick as many as you like within a category.
Show favorites only — tap the heart icon in the toolbar to see just the recipes you've hearted.
Switch between list and grid view using the toggle next to the search bar — whichever's easier to scan.

📱 On mobile: the "Add a recipe" button in the header loses its label and becomes icon-only, the filter buttons (Meal types/Main ingredients/etc.) become a horizontal scroll instead of wrapping, and grid view narrows to 2 columns.

On desktop:

On mobile:

On desktop:

On mobile:

To favorite a recipe, just click the heart icon on its card — it works the same way in either view.

💡 Tip: If a search or filter combination doesn't match anything, the list will just look empty rather than showing a "no results" message — try clearing a filter or two if that happens.

Step 2: Delete a recipe

Hover over a recipe (or long-press on mobile) to reveal its delete icon.

📱 On mobile: in list view, you can also swipe a recipe row left to reveal the delete icon, in addition to long-pressing — grid view only supports the long-press.

Click it and confirm.

If the recipe has personal notes attached, you'll get a second confirmation warning that those notes will be deleted too.

📌 Before you delete: since your cookbooks and collections only reference recipes in your box rather than keeping their own copy, deleting a recipe here removes it from every cookbook and collection it's part of — not just your Recipe Box. If you just want it out of one cookbook, remove it from that cookbook's interior instead (see the Cookbook guide).

Sending recipes onward

Once a recipe's in your box, you can:

Add it to a Collection — a shareable digital grouping of recipes. From the "Add it to a collection?" prompt after saving, or from the recipe's own page.
Add it to a Cookbook — pulls it into a printable book you're designing. See Creating Your Cookbook.

Ready to actually look at and cook from a recipe? Head to Viewing & Tweaking Recipes with Vini — that covers adjusting portions, converting units, and getting AI help changing up a recipe.