Does the recipe add to my post's word count?

WordPress takes your recipe into consideration for your post’s word count. The reason it’s a lot more than your actual recipe text is because it also counts any styling information as “words.”

If you’re concerned about word count, you can do a test recipe in a blank post and see how many words a recipe equates to and use that going forward. Alternatively, you can add your recipe before adding any other content and see how many words that specific recipe equates to.