Start Cooking
Follow a focused cooking guide without changing the saved recipe.
Start Cooking turns a saved recipe into a focused guide with four stages: Plan, Gather, Prep, and Cook. It keeps the information needed right now close at hand while the saved recipe remains the source of truth.
Open Start Cooking
- Open a recipe.
- Choose Start Cooking.
- If Sparky Cooks needs to prepare or refresh the cooking guide, keep the recipe open while the current preparation step is shown.
- Begin with Plan, or choose another stage when you already know where you want to start.
The first opening can take longer for an existing or detailed recipe. A current guide is reused until cooking-related recipe content changes.
What the Guide Uses
Sparky Cooks derives a cooking guide from the saved recipe. Depending on what the recipe contains, the guide can organize:
- Ingredients and ingredient sections.
- Important equipment.
- Preparation tasks.
- Cooking steps and phases.
- Ingredients and equipment used by a particular step.
- Times, temperatures, servings, and warnings.
Generated guidance can be incomplete when the original recipe is unclear. Always check the saved recipe when a warning appears or something important seems to be missing.
The Recipe Does Not Change
Using Start Cooking does not rewrite ingredients, directions, or other recipe content. Checkmarks, the current stage, and the current cooking step belong to the cooking session, not to the recipe.
To change the recipe itself, close Start Cooking and use the recipe editor.