The app
Bucate
The Moldovan table, dish by dish.
Moldovan cooking is warm, generous, garden-fed food: golden mămăligă, tender sarmale, flaky plăcinte, tangy soups and jars of preserves put up in season. Bucate gathers that heritage into one calm, offline cookbook and asks nothing in return — no account, no advertising, no connection.
The catalogue is photo-forward and plainly written. Every classic dish carries an honest introduction about what it is, how it tastes, and the place it holds on a Moldovan table, from a Tuesday supper to the plates that only appear at Easter and Christmas.
- Mains
- Baking
- Starters
At the stove
Open a dish, cook it through
Each recipe opens with quick facts on course, difficulty and timing, a clear ingredient list, and a servings scaler that recalculates quantities the moment you cook for two instead of six. When you are ready, switch to the step-by-step view that walks you through one instruction at a time, with a gentle timer on the steps that need watching, so nothing catches while you stir the polenta.
Find it
Filter by course or occasion, search by name or by an ingredient already in the fridge.
Keep it
Star what you love, mark what you have cooked, and work through the repertoire.
Shop it
Missing things go onto a built-in list for the market, and a short page explains the cuisine to newcomers.
Everything is written in both Moldovan and English, kept family-friendly, and stored entirely on your device.
A cookbook, not a food-safety authority. Recipes assume a working kitchen and an adult at the stove. Cook poultry, pork and eggs through, chill leftovers quickly, keep the fridge at 5 °C or below, and follow a tested, properly sterilised method for anything you seal and keep, because home bottling done casually is one of the few genuinely dangerous things in a kitchen. Wheat, eggs, dairy and nuts run through this cuisine, so read the ingredient list yourself. Keep children clear of hot fat and of boiling mămăligă, which sticks and burns. In an emergency in Moldova, call 112.
Working out
What doesn't double when you double the recipe
The app scales ingredients, and ingredients scale honestly: twice the guests, twice the flour. Three other things in the kitchen refuse to follow, because they depend on shape rather than amount.
Heat has to travel to the middle, and the distance grows with the cube root of the mass while the time grows with the square of that distance, so oven time follows mass to the power two thirds: double the sarmale pot and it wants about 1.59 times as long, not twice. Area behaves the other way for baking: to keep a plăcintă the same thickness you need a tray √2 wider, which turns a 24 cm round into a 34 cm one. And a bigger pot has proportionally less surface for its volume, so a doubled soup loses about a fifth less water per litre and needs longer, not less, to thicken.
What's not here: no recipes, no ingredients, no timers and no scaler. These are three ratios about geometry, worked out for evenly shaped food in an ordinary oven; a real pan, a real stuffed cabbage roll and a real fan oven all argue with them. The dishes, the measures and the step-by-step are in the app.