Who is Paul?

I’m a home cook based in Europe with a background in technology. I didn’t go to culinary school. I don’t have a professional kitchen. What I do have is years of obsessive interest in how food works — not just what to cook, but why certain techniques produce certain results, and why most recipes skip that part entirely.

The recipes on RecipeFlow come from cuisines I’ve cooked from for years — Romanian, French, Italian, Middle Eastern, East Asian, African, and more. Each one gets tested in the same kitchen most people actually cook in: a regular hob, a regular oven, and whatever fits in a standard-size pan.

How RecipeFlow started

A few years ago I came across a large archive of recipes — thousands of them, from dozens of cuisines, collected over decades. Many were incomplete. Some had wrong quantities. A lot of them had never been properly tested with modern home-kitchen equipment.

The project became: restore them, test them, and publish the ones that actually work. Not the ones that look good in a photo. Not the ones that use five specialty ingredients most people can’t find. The ones that produce a reliably good result in a real home kitchen, with real constraints — time, equipment, budget.

That’s still the criteria. If a recipe doesn’t pass the test, it doesn’t go on the site. It sounds simple, but it filters out a significant percentage of what’s out there.

What “tested” actually means

Every recipe on RecipeFlow has been cooked through at least once, with attention to the moments that typically go wrong. That might be the temperature at which eggs curdle in a carbonara. It might be why a dough gets tough when you overwork it, or why a sauce breaks if you add the fat too fast.

The goal isn’t just to list ingredients and steps. It’s to explain the one or two things that actually determine whether the dish works — the part most recipes bury in a footnote or skip entirely.

No thermomixers. No precision scales required. No ingredients that need a specialty shop. If a technique genuinely requires something unusual, that’s explained — and usually there’s a workaround for a regular kitchen.

What you’ll find here

RecipeFlow has over 11,000 published recipes across more than 150 categories — everything from quick weeknight dinners to weekend projects, from Romanian soups to West African stews to Japanese noodles. The range is intentional. Cooking across cuisines is how you start to understand the underlying patterns that make food work, regardless of origin.

The site is still growing. There are thousands more recipes in the archive being tested and added. If there’s a cuisine or dish type you’re looking for and can’t find it yet, check back — it’s probably coming.