New app ClipDish saves only the recipe (and nothing else) from cooking sites

We’ve all been there: You’re standing in the grocery store with a basket full of items, scrolling through a recipe you found to figure out if you need red onions or shallots for your soup.

The author of the recipe post is going on and on about their childhood memories of this dish and how their spouse and children love it so, so much. But you just need to know which freaking onions to buy.

“I’m standing there, scrolling through my phone, and I just keep hitting these pop-up ads,” Doylestown-based developer Joe Cotellese said of his new app, ClipDish. “I really thought to myself, there’s got to be an easier way. That’s when I realized this is the core problem we’re trying to solve.”

ClipDish, an app that saves only the recipe from a food blogger or recipe site’s post, went live on the iOS store about two weeks ago. Once you’ve found a recipe you’re interested in, you can save it to the app, which will scan and pull out only necessary information and instructions. You’re left with simply the ingredients and instructions.

“Use ClipDish to save your favorite recipes from the web, minus all the extra stuff,” the app touts.

The app is the first product rollout of AppJawn, a bootstrapped startup that Cotellese founded with Matthew Smollinger, a Brooklyn-based engineer. Both are avid cooks with product management backgrounds who had a vision for simplifying the use of online recipes.

After a few months of development, the app went live on the iOS store in early January. Cotellese said the duo used a lot of the same technology Google uses in its search function to identify and pull just the recipe from the site and that their tech stack is mostly iOS based with AWS background, Python and AWS Lambda.

The duo is currently deciding between working on an Android version of the app for Q1, or putting more time into refining and shaping the current iOS app.

Cotellese said he’s been lucky to always work on projects that he’s passionate about, probably because he started off his career testing video games.

“It’s just one of those things where my first job shaped my professional identify,” he said.

So, naturally, working on ClipDish has only upped his interest in cooking. He said his favorite dish to make changes with the season, so right now he’s really into making soup from scratch. Cooking and working on the app has also showed him how to identify problems and think of new solutions as he goes along.

“I’ve never done engineering on the boring thing,” he said. “You’ll be a better product manager, a better engineer if you’re working on projects that you’re really excited about.”

ClipDish is available for download for free in the iOS store.