About us
A cookbook written by the people who cook
Simmer began because the best recipes we knew were never on a website — they were in messages, notebooks and phone photos. So we built a place to keep them together.
Our story
Most recipe sites are written for search engines. Ours is written for the person standing in front of an open fridge at 6pm, wondering what to do with half a cabbage and some leftover rice. Every recipe on Simmer has been cooked in a real kitchen, photographed on a real plate and rated by people who made it more than once.
We keep the format deliberately simple: a photo, an honest description, an ingredient list you can shop from, and steps short enough to read with flour on your hands. Anything else — the anecdotes, the swaps, the "I used yoghurt instead" — lives in the comments, where it belongs.
Simmer is free to use and always will be for home cooks. Sharing a recipe takes a couple of minutes, and once it's up it belongs to the community: people rate it, remix it and post their own photos of the result underneath.
What we care about
Real photos only
Every recipe shows how the dish actually turned out in a home kitchen — no studio styling, no stock plates.
Generous by default
Recipes are meant to be passed on. Substitutions, family tweaks and shortcuts are all welcome in the comments.
Cooks, not critics
Ratings come from people who actually made the dish, so the five-star badge means something.
Everyday ingredients
We favour recipes you can shop for on a weeknight, not ones that need three specialty stores.
How we got here
2023
Simmer starts as a shared note between four friends swapping weeknight dinners.
2024
The first public cookbook launches with 200 recipes and photo comments.
2025
Ratings, saved cookbooks and the monthly cook-along challenge arrive.
2026
Home cooks across 40 countries publish and rate recipes every week.