🍽️ Bon Appétit Recipe Scraper

🚀 Export Bon Appétit recipes to CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in seconds. Search by keyword or category and get full ingredient lists, step-by-step instructions, ratings, and author credits - no API key, no registration required.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 17 fields per record · 🍳 Thousands of recipes · 🌍 Covers all cuisines · ⭐ Includes ratings and reviews

The Bon Appétit Scraper extracts recipes from Bon Appétit magazine's website (bonappetit.com) and returns 17 fields per record, including full ingredient lists, step-by-step cooking instructions, cook times, servings, ratings, review counts, author credits, and tags. All data is sourced from the JSON-LD structured data embedded in each recipe page.

Bon Appétit is one of the world's most respected food and recipe publications, with decades of trusted recipes from professional chefs and food editors. This Actor makes their publicly available recipe catalog searchable and downloadable in any format in under a minute.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Food bloggers, recipe app developers, culinary researchers, meal planning platforms, AI training datasets, home cooks, nutrition analysts	Recipe database building, meal planning apps, ingredient analysis, cooking time research, food trend analysis, culinary NLP training

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📋 What the Bon Appétit Scraper does

Three flexible workflows in a single run:

• 🔍 Keyword search. Search by any term like pasta, chocolate, grilled chicken, or vegan.
• 🏷️ Category filter. Filter by ingredient or cuisine category like dessert, salad, italian, or quick.
• 📦 Bulk export. Collect up to 1,000,000 recipes for large-scale dataset creation.

Each record includes the recipe image, title, description, author, star rating, review count, full ingredient list, step-by-step instructions, cook time, total time, servings, difficulty, tags, source URL, and publication date.

💡 Why it matters: manually copying recipes is slow and loses structure. Building your own parser means handling HTML quirks, JSON-LD variations, and pagination by hand. This Actor handles all of that and returns clean, structured data ready for databases, apps, or AI pipelines.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded recipe dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
searchQuery	string	"pasta"	Keyword to search for recipes. Leave empty to use category instead.
category	string	null	Category tag to filter recipes (e.g. dessert, chicken, salad). Used when searchQuery is empty.
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum recipes to return. Free plan caps at 10; paid plan at 1,000,000.

Example: 10 pasta recipes.

{
    "searchQuery": "pasta",
    "maxItems": 10
}

Example: 50 dessert recipes by category.

{
    "category": "dessert",
    "maxItems": 50
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Bon Appétit serves publicly accessible recipes with full JSON-LD structured data. Some older recipes may not include cook time in the structured data - the cookTime and totalTime fields will be null for those records. The difficulty field is derived from recipe tags and will be null when Bon Appétit has not tagged a difficulty level.

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📊 Output

Each record contains 17 fields:

Field	Type	Description
🖼️ imageUrl	string	High-resolution recipe photo URL
📌 title	string	Recipe title
📝 description	string	Short recipe summary
👤 author	string	Recipe author name
⭐ rating	number	Aggregate star rating (e.g. 4.8)
💬 reviewCount	integer	Number of user reviews
🥕 ingredients	array	Full ingredient list with measurements
📋 instructions	array	Step-by-step cooking instructions
🍳 cookTime	string	Active cook time (e.g. "22 minutes")
⏰ totalTime	string	Total recipe time including resting
🍽️ servings	string	Serving size (e.g. "4 servings")
🎯 difficulty	string	Difficulty level from tags (e.g. "easy")
🔖 tags	array	Recipe tags (cuisine, occasion, technique)
🔗 url	string	Source recipe URL
📅 publishedAt	string	Original publication date (ISO 8601)
🕒 scrapedAt	string	Timestamp of scrape run (ISO 8601)
❌ error	string	Error message if scrape failed, else null

Sample record 1 - Pasta Alla Vodka:

{
  "imageUrl": "https://assets.bonappetit.com/photos/5a8da4996497380283798c16/16:9/w_4991,h_2807,c_limit/rigatoni-with-vodka-sauce.jpg",
  "title": "Pasta Alla Vodka",
  "description": "This easy vodka pasta recipe combines tomato paste, cream, and a splash of booze for a dinner that comes together quickly, using just a few pantry ingredients.",
  "author": "Claire Saffitz",
  "rating": 4.8,
  "reviewCount": 511,
  "ingredients": [
    "Kosher salt",
    "1 medium onion",
    "4 garlic cloves",
    "2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil",
    "2 Tbsp. tomato paste",
    "½ tsp. crushed red pepper flakes",
    "¾ cup vodka",
    "¾ cup heavy cream",
    "2 Tbsp. unsalted butter",
    "12 oz. rigatoni",
    "1 oz. Parmesan, finely grated"
  ],
  "instructions": [
    "Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil.",
    "While water comes to a boil, peel and finely chop 1 medium onion and 4 garlic cloves...",
    "Heat 2 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil in a large heavy pot over medium..."
  ],
  "cookTime": "30 minutes",
  "totalTime": "30 minutes",
  "servings": "4 servings",
  "difficulty": "easy",
  "tags": ["dinner", "pasta", "tomato", "italian", "easy", "quick", "main", "nut-free"],
  "url": "https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/rigatoni-with-easy-vodka-sauce",
  "publishedAt": "2018-01-01T05:00:00.000-05:00",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T03:08:40.123Z",
  "error": null
}

Sample record 2 - Homemade Pasta Dough:

{
  "imageUrl": "https://assets.bonappetit.com/photos/57d828806520aa8f7013c947/master/w_4269,h_2935,c_limit/fresh-pasta-dough.jpg",
  "title": "Homemade Pasta Dough",
  "description": "A bit of olive oil gives this fresh pasta dough recipe extra flexibility and versatility. Use it to make fettuccine, pappardelle, ravioli, or lasagna.",
  "author": "Rick Martinez",
  "rating": 4.2,
  "reviewCount": 310,
  "ingredients": [
    "3 large eggs, beaten to blend",
    "2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour",
    "1 Tbsp. olive oil",
    "1 tsp. Diamond Crystal or ½ tsp. plus ⅛ tsp. Morton kosher salt",
    "Cornmeal or semolina flour (for dusting)"
  ],
  "instructions": [
    "Mix 3 large eggs, beaten to blend, 2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour, 1 Tbsp. olive oil, and 1 tsp. kosher salt in the bowl of a stand mixer with your hands until a shaggy dough forms...",
    "Dust a large rimmed baking sheet with cornmeal or semolina flour...",
    "Repeat without folding, adjusting machine one setting thinner after every pass..."
  ],
  "cookTime": "35 minutes",
  "totalTime": "45 minutes",
  "servings": "Makes about 1 pound",
  "difficulty": null,
  "tags": ["dinner", "pasta", "dough", "italian", "main", "nut-free"],
  "url": "https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/fresh-pasta-dough",
  "publishedAt": "2016-09-23T04:00:03.000-04:00",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T03:08:39.244Z",
  "error": null
}

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✨ Why choose this Actor

Feature	Detail
📐 Structured JSON-LD parsing	Extracts data from Bon Appétit's embedded Schema.org Recipe markup - no brittle HTML selectors
🥕 Full ingredient lists	Every ingredient with exact measurements, not just a count
📋 Step-by-step instructions	Each cooking step as a separate array element, ready for display
⭐ Real ratings and reviews	Aggregate rating value and review count per recipe
👤 Author attribution	Named author credit for every recipe
🔖 Rich tags	Cuisine type, occasion, cooking technique, dietary restrictions
🕒 Publication dates	Original publish date for freshness sorting
📦 Scales to 1,000,000 items	Reliable pagination and rate-limiting built in

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Feature	This Actor	Manual scraping	Other scrapers
JSON-LD parsing	Yes	Build it yourself	Varies
Full ingredient list	Yes	Requires HTML parser	Often truncated
Step-by-step instructions	Yes	Complex to extract	Often combined
Author + rating + reviews	Yes	Multiple selectors	Often missing
Keyword search	Yes	Not available	Rarely
Scales to 1M+	Yes	Memory-limited	Often not
No API key needed	Yes	Yes	Yes
Export to CSV/Excel/JSON	Yes	Manual work	Varies

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🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account - Create a free account w/ $5 credit
2. Open the Actor - Search for "Bon Appétit Scraper" in the Apify Store or go directly to the Actor page
3. Set your input - Enter a search query like pasta or a category like dessert, set your maxItems
4. Run the Actor - Click "Start" and wait for the run to complete (typically under 2 minutes for 50 recipes)
5. Download your data - Export as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML from the dataset tab

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💼 Business use cases

Recipe App Development

Build a recipe discovery app seeded with thousands of Bon Appétit recipes. The structured ingredient arrays and instruction steps are ready to render directly in mobile or web UIs. Use the tags array to build faceted category navigation.

Meal Planning Platforms

Ingest recipes in bulk, index by cook time and tags, and build personalized weekly meal plan generators. The servings and totalTime fields power recipe scaling and schedule optimization.

Food Content and SEO

Food bloggers and content teams can monitor the Bon Appétit recipe catalog to identify trending cuisines, seasonal topics, and ingredient combinations. Use publication dates to track what's being published month-by-month.

AI and NLP Training Data

Build culinary language models, recipe generation systems, or ingredient substitution engines using clean, structured recipe text. The ingredients and instructions arrays are pre-split and ready for tokenization.

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🔌 Automating Bon Appétit Scraper

Connect this Actor to thousands of apps using Apify's native integrations:

• Make (Integromat) - Trigger a recipe scrape on a schedule and push results to Google Sheets or Airtable
• Zapier - When a run completes, send new recipe data to Slack, Notion, or a CRM
• Webhook - POST the dataset URL to any endpoint when the run finishes
• Apify API - Call the Actor programmatically from any codebase using the REST API or official client libraries (Node.js, Python)
• Google Sheets - Use Apify's Google Sheets integration to sync recipe data directly to a spreadsheet
• Slack - Get a Slack notification with recipe counts and a dataset download link when each run completes

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Culinary Research and Education

Academics and culinary schools can use the dataset to study recipe composition, ingredient co-occurrence patterns, and the evolution of food trends over decades of Bon Appétit publication history.

Creative Projects

Writers, food photographers, and home cooks exploring new cuisines can use keyword and category search to discover recipes they wouldn't normally encounter. Filter by tags like "nut-free" or "quick" to match dietary needs or time constraints.

Non-Profit and Community Work

Food banks, community kitchens, and nutrition outreach organizations can extract large recipe collections to build free cooking resources, printable recipe cards, or ingredient-based meal suggestions for clients.

Experimentation and Prototyping

Developers prototyping recipe recommendation engines, flavor pairing tools, or ingredient substitution algorithms need large, clean datasets fast. This Actor provides that in minutes rather than weeks of scraper development.

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

You can ask an AI assistant questions like:

• "What fields does the Bon Appétit Scraper return?"
• "How do I filter recipes by category using this Actor?"
• "How do I connect this scraper to Google Sheets using Make?"
• "What's the difference between searchQuery and category inputs?"

The structured output and clean schema make it easy to integrate with AI pipelines, chatbots, and recommendation systems.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Does this require a Bon Appétit subscription? No. This Actor scrapes publicly accessible recipe pages. No login, subscription, or API key is required.

❓ How many recipes can I scrape? Free users get up to 10 recipes per run. Paid users can scrape up to 1,000,000 recipes per run.

❓ How fast does it run? A typical run of 50 recipes completes in under 2 minutes. Larger runs scale proportionally with built-in rate limiting to avoid being blocked.

❓ Can I search by multiple keywords? Yes. Enter a phrase in searchQuery like "chocolate cake" or "grilled chicken" and the Actor will search for matching recipes.

❓ What's the difference between searchQuery and category? Both perform a keyword search on Bon Appétit's search page. searchQuery takes priority. If only category is provided, it is used as the search term. Use category for single-topic filtering like "dessert" or "pasta".

❓ Are ingredients returned as a structured list? Yes. The ingredients field is a JSON array where each element is one ingredient with its measurement (e.g. "2 cups all-purpose flour").

❓ Are instructions returned per-step? Yes. The instructions field is a JSON array where each element is one cooking step, ready to display as a numbered list.

❓ Why are some cookTime or totalTime fields null? Bon Appétit's structured data does not include time fields for all recipes, particularly older ones. When a recipe does not include timing in its JSON-LD data, those fields will be null.

❓ Why is difficulty sometimes null? Difficulty is derived from Bon Appétit's own tagging. Not all recipes are tagged with a difficulty level. When the difficulty tag (easy, medium, etc.) is absent, the field returns null.

❓ Can I export the data to Excel or CSV? Yes. Apify's dataset viewer lets you download results in CSV, Excel, JSON, and XML formats from the Storage tab after each run.

❓ How do I run this on a schedule? In the Actor settings on Apify Console, click "Schedule" and set a cron expression. The Actor will run automatically and store each run's results in a separate dataset.

❓ Is the data real-time? Yes. Every run fetches live data from Bon Appétit's website. There is no caching or pre-stored data.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Connect this Actor to your workflow using Apify's native integrations:

Integration	Use case
Google Sheets	Sync recipes to a spreadsheet for team collaboration
Airtable	Build a searchable recipe database with custom views
Notion	Import recipes into a Notion database for meal planning
Slack	Get run summaries posted to a channel automatically
Make (Integromat)	Multi-step automation with hundreds of supported apps
Zapier	Trigger workflows in 6,000+ apps when a run completes
Apify REST API	Call from any codebase with the official Node.js or Python SDK
Webhooks	POST dataset URLs to any custom endpoint on run completion
Excel	Download CSV and open directly in Microsoft Excel
BigQuery / Snowflake	Feed cleaned recipe data into a data warehouse

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for 150+ ready-to-use data extractors covering food, travel, jobs, finance, and more.

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Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool for accessing publicly available recipe data from Bon Appétit for legitimate research, development, and personal use. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Bon Appétit or Conde Nast. Use responsibly and in accordance with Bon Appétit's Terms of Service. Recipe content is copyright of Bon Appétit and its authors.