I recently built a feature for https://recipe-finder.org that takes a TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube cooking link and turns it into a structured recipe.

The goal was simple: recipe inspiration lives on social platforms, but the actual cooking steps are usually buried inside captions, spoken instructions, or fast cuts. I wanted a workflow where a user pastes a link and gets back something usable: a recipe title, ingredient list, instructions, and a cleaner format for the rest of the product.

The Flow

The core user journey is straightforward:

The user pastes a supported social video URL.

The frontend sends that URL to a protected backend endpoint.

The backend normalizes the link, fetches available source metadata and text, and runs an extraction pass.

The result is converted into a structured recipe object.

The app returns a clean recipe view, keeps recent imports in history, and can reuse cached results for repeated links.

What makes this interesting isn't just the form input—it's the cleanup step…