How to keep your phone screen on while cooking

The usual fix is to dig into Settings and set the screen timeout to "never", which works and then quietly murders your battery for the rest of the week because you forgot to change it back.

Why reading a recipe on a phone is miserable

• The screen sleeps. Thirty seconds of kneading and you are back to a black rectangle.
• The text is tiny. Recipe pages are built for reading at a desk, not glancing at from a metre away.
• You lose your place. Scrolling past the ads to find step 6 again, every single time.
• Touching the phone is the problem. Any solution requiring clean hands is not a solution.

How to do it in ChefBook

1. Open the recipe and tap Cook Mode. It switches to a full-screen, step-by-step view designed for a counter, not a desk.
2. The screen stays awake — automatically. Cook Mode keeps the display on for as long as you are cooking, with no trip to system settings and nothing to remember to undo afterwards. When you leave, normal battery behaviour returns.
3. Read from a distance. Large text, one step at a time, no ads and no navigation clutter. You can read it from across the worktop with steam in your face.
4. Swipe between steps. Big swipe targets, so a knuckle works. No precision tapping with greasy fingers.
5. Prop it up and cook. On a tablet the adaptive layout makes this even better — stand it on the counter and it reads like a cookbook that never closes.

Set yourself up before you start

Scale the recipe to your actual number of servings first, so you are not doing arithmetic with your hands full. Glance at the nutrition if it matters to you. Send anything you are missing to the grocery list before you begin rather than discovering it at step four.

Then open Cook Mode and do not touch the phone again except to swipe. That is what hands-free actually means.