Once in a while, I still like to flip through the pages of glossy cookbooks, and sometimes I even enjoy rifling through handwritten index cards in my recipe box. But these days, most of the time I need culinary inspiration, I simply tap an app on my smartphone. Here are eight recipe apps that can help everyone, from the home cook preparing a family dinner to the gourmet foodie preparing a fancy holiday meal. All are available from the App Store and Google Play.
Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List
From Conde Nast, publishers of glossy magazine fare such as GQ, Vogue and Architectural Digest, the Epicurious app has been around for a couple of years but has recently undergone some changes. It features bigger, clearer recipe layouts, voice-activated controls for hands-free cooking and ways to create, manage and share shopping lists. You can access more than 30,000 recipes, including those featured in Conde Nast’s Bon Appetit magazine. The app’s interface is user-friendly and eye-catching. The “What’s in Season” feature is cool for cooks who want to use the freshest seasonal ingredients.
Allthecooks
If you’re looking for a recipe database and community for cooks similar to a Facebook for home cooks, then download the Allthecooks app. Get cooking ideas, talk about recipes, share photos and, more importantly, discover new recipes to try at home.
Allrecipes Dinner Spinner
If you’ve used the website allrecipes.com, you know it is an excellent resource. The Dinner Spinner app has the same features with a twist of fun. You shake the phone to get suggestions for what to cook based on dish type (appetizer, entree or dessert), ingredients and time. The app gives you instant access to Allrecipes’ collection of member-submitted recipes, featuring photos, ratings and reviews.
Chef Tap
ChefTap is a recipe organizer. What is different about the ChefTap app is that you can automatically clip recipes from any website, including allrecipes.com and epicurious.com, even an entire Pinterest board! You can edit and tweak your recipes as well as add your own pictures. You can then share your recipes via email or export recipes via text or HTML.
You probably already use the Pinterest app as a bookmarking tool for crafts, hobbies, home improvement projects, fashion styles or dream vacations; why not use it to search for and organize recipes? This easy-to-use app is just like the website: You can pin recipes you like to your own boards and search other people’s boards for delicious things to make.
Yummly
Perhaps one of the most attractive layouts belongs to Yummly, a site and app launched for foodies. You can search for recipes by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources. Save your “yums” and create shopping lists based on the recipes you choose, then have the ingredients delivered to your door. That’s right. It has a grocery-delivery service. What makes Yummly unique is that you can personalize it because the app learns what you like and can make recommendations.
Big Oven
With more than 350,000 recipes, this is one big resource with a clean interface. You can search for food by type and ingredient. Upgrade to a paid pro plan, and you can do things like excluding ingredients and specifying dietary restrictions. Easy preplanned menus are very helpful. You can simply search for a recipe and then add it to your own menu. The ingredients for the recipe are automatically added to your shopping list. You can then modify the list based on what you already have in your pantry.
Food Network in the Kitchen
Fans of celebrity chefs Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis, Guy Fieri and others will enjoy the Food Network in the Kitchen app. You can search recipes by chefs, and each recipe refers to the TV show on which it appears. A search for tacos, for example, brings up Tyler Florence’s Tacos Carne Asada recipe from the show “Food 911” and fish tacos courtesy of Lisa Ortega as featured on the show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” Click on the photo and you can even watch a video walking you through the recipe, as seen on the TV show.
