Experienced cooks often work without a recipe – creating charming culinary concoctions from their experience and intuition. Success requires repeated tastings – it is an active process with multiple feedback loops. Less experienced cooks try to copy the masters' creations by using recipes. In time, these novices gain enough experience and skill to trust their own abilities to taste the food and adapt these recipes to ‘make them their own’. Four papers in this issue of London Journal of Primary Care provide recipes for integrated models of working together that can be locally adapted. They provide us with models to: uncover the strengths (assets) within communities for sustainable development,1 use routinely collected data to reveal the effect of locally led health improvement,2 stimulate collaborative working between general practices and others to solve complex health and social needs,3 and engage diverse organisations to move care from hospital to community.4 Together, these papers present a cookbook of recipes for integrated care – showing how generalist and specialist healthcare practitioners, social care and public health can enhance each other's abilities to produce healthy people and healthy populations. The papers show how even novices can facilitate complex inter-organisational collaborations by using established recipes, and who will in time become experts at creating their own. We describe the (dry and liquid) ingredients that the authors use – the large number alone shows how deceptively complex integrated care can be. Then, we continue the cooking metaphor to compare integrated care with baking bread – melding multiple ingredients from different sources to create beautifully tasting meals that are more than the sum of the parts.