Knead

App Store Cover - iPhone
App Store Cover - iPad
Knead Icon
Bakis session steps
Baking Schedule
Recipe Detail

Inspiration

If I start baking now, will I be able to leave to pick up my kids at 4pm? Will I be finished by 9pm? Most bread recipes just requires 30-45 minutes of work, but a lot more time is spent letting the dough rest; if you bake bread, especially sourdough, it's hard to have a general picture of the actual time spent cooking.

What it does

Knead lets you schedule your bread and pizza recipes. When you import web recipes, they are broken into simple steps. When you schedule a baking session, a timeline lets you see when you have to bake and when you are free to do other chores. A bread diary lets you record each baking session, so you can pick up from there the next time.

How we built it

Knead is a native iOS app, running on iPad and iPhone. It was mostly built the old way, screen after screen, with manual coding. Some screens and feature were enhanced with the use of coding agents. It was conceived when iOS 26 was announced, and I decided to try and analyse recipes with Apple Intelligence.

Challenges we ran into

Local Apple Intelligence model proved too weak and slow to parse recipe steps accurately. After a lot of experimentation, Gemini models were used for remote analysis of server-indexed recipes, and the local engine was reverted to an old school processor based on regular expressions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Palette, fonts and illustrations were hand-picked with attention. Knead has a retro, paper-like look and feel, the modern day equivalent of a recipe book. Knead lets you import recipe in a breeze, also form Safari. Once imported, you can edit recipes, adjust times and ingredients. A simple control lets you adapt the recipe based on the desired output: how many loaves, how big is your pan, etc.