The Tandoori Chicken That Started It All

Let me tell you exactly how this app happened, because it was not a business plan. It was a bowl of yogurt and a memory that quit on me mid-recipe.

Tandoori chicken night. The air fryer kind. The drumsticks were cleaned and gashed and sitting happily in their first marinade, just lemon and salt, easy. I was feeling very competent. Then came the actual tandoori marinade, and here is the thing about that marinade: it needs thirteen ingredients. Thirteen.

Yogurt went in. Ginger-garlic paste, in. Kashmiri chilli powder, in, some amount, felt right. And then my brain simply walked away.

Was garam masala half a spoon or a whole one? Tandoori masala AND garam masala, or was that the same thing counted twice? There is already salt on the chicken from the first marinade, so does this one get salt too? (It does. A little. I know that now.) And two ingredients I forgot existed entirely: kasoori methi and corn flour. Corn flour! In tandoori chicken! Nobody on earth remembers the corn flour, and it turns out that is half the reason the outside goes crisp.

So there I stood, one hand deep in yogurt, quantities half guessed, having a very calm and reasonable thought:

"I should just note this down somewhere"

That was it. That was the whole ambition. Not "I should become a chef." Not "I should build an app." Just: never again. Write my recipes down once, my way, with my quantities, and keep them somewhere I can open at the stove with one clean knuckle.

A cookbook that lives in my phone. Surely that exists. So after dinner I went to the app store, the way you do, full of hope.

The app store humbled me

You already know this part, because it has happened to you with some app, somewhere. I downloaded a recipe app. Then another. Then, honestly, about six more, each one promising to be the clean and simple one.

Every single one pulled the same three moves. Ads, first: banners under the recipe, videos between the steps, a full-screen surprise right as you open the thing with wet hands. Clutter, second: ten thousand strangers' recipes, meal plans, streaks and badges shoved at me before I could save a single recipe of my own. And then the finale, the premium wall: unlock the actual useful part for somewhere north of a hundred dollars a year.

A hundred dollars. A year. To store text. My own text. My own family's recipes, written by me, held hostage behind a subscription that costs more than the chicken.

I sat there with the free trial screen glowing at me and said, out loud, to nobody: no.

"Fine. I'll make one myself."

Not a startup idea. A kitchen-sized act of stubbornness. What I wanted was almost embarrassingly simple: my recipes, one step at a time, in letters big enough to read from the counter. The step that needs thirteen ingredients should have all thirteen right there on the screen, with the amounts, at the exact moment my brain gives up. Clean. Convenient. No ads. No account wall. No rent on my own dal recipe.

That is Cooking Steps. Every recipe becomes a stack of steps. The marinade step lists the marinade. The air fryer step has the timer already attached, 400°F, flip halfway, done when it rings. Swipe, stir, swipe. It is free, and it is staying free, because charging someone a hundred dollars a year to remember their own food is exactly the thing I was escaping.

The chicken that started all this? It came out great, eventually. It now lives in the app as one of the starter recipes, with all thirteen marinade ingredients exactly where my memory dropped them.

Every new feature still gets tested against that evening: would it have helped with yogurt hands and a blank mind? If yes, it goes in. If it only looks good in a screenshot, it stays out.

If you have ever stood in your kitchen, mid-recipe, thinking "I should just note this down somewhere", this is that somewhere. Come try it. The tandoori chicken is already on the shelf, corn flour and all.