It is not always easy to cook at home and can be quite a demanding ordeal, except if you have an idea about some basic cooking skills. Looking and exploring for recipes on the web is a simple solution. But, having your laptop in the kitchen can get messier and sometimes annoying to work with. Fortunately, having a smartphone at your helm equipped with the right apps makes it all easy. Diverse apps have revolutionised the way we use our smartphones. Every facet of our lives is touched by apps which also includes cooking.
There are some excellent recipe apps for iPhone and Android that help in the process of cooking. Even an amateur can learn the culinary arts through these apps, such is their functionality. With the devices having vivid touch screens these days, a decent tablet with some best cooking and recipe apps can turn into your personal cookbook. These apps assist you in many ways such as to discover new recipes, organize recipes, sort menus, track shopping lists, meal calendars and others. Some apps are even rich in media, presenting you information through photos and videos. But, what are the best ones? To make your task easier we have selected a list of 14 best cooking apps for both Android and iPhone that can make your dream of becoming a chef at home come true.
Best Cooking Apps for Android and iPhone/iPad
1) Sidechef
Cooking can be quite a tricky skill to learn. With various aspects of the experience such as handling ingredients, kitchen tools and watching over the recipe often leaving you intimidated. Sidechef makes the job a lot easier by offering recipes with clear, detailed instructions along with media and voice guidelines. With timers built in, you can go along trying out the recipe without the need to handle the touch screen. Along with these, Sidechef also provides other value added features such as extensive search tools for recipes, featured recipes, etc.
Download Sidechef for iOS | Download Sidechef for Android
2) Yummly
It can be cumbersome at times to browse through a cascade of recipes to find just the one perfect for your diet and taste. Yummly helps out in such times by considering your tastes and diet preferences and providing you with a list of appropriate recipes suitable to your palate. This app asks you to select about 5 recipes from a list shown and once this gets done, Yummly keeps this as the benchmark and offers you a filtered list of recipes that is up to your tastes and diet. Apart from this you get most of the usual cooking app features such as marking favorites, creating shopping lists, etc.
Download Yummly for iOS | Download Yummly for Android
3) Paprika
Paprika is a great app to help you manage recipes and organize your cooking. It allows you to pick and save recipes from websites by using the in app browser. It also has some nice features such as automatically sorting out your groceries, advance planning for meals for a complete month and other useful features. Another great advantage is that you can use this across different platforms including the iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.
Download Paprika for iOS | Download Paprika for Android
4) Pepperplate
If you are one of those who already have a list of recipes, but need to store and manage them in a better way, this app will do the trick for you. Pepperplate does not provide recipes on its own. However, this app offers great recipe customization options by letting you to upload you own list of recipes or to select them from around the Internet. Along with these, you also shopping list creation and the feature to plan meals that comes handy during holidays and celebration times.
Download Pepperplate for iOS | Download Pepperplate for Android
5) Kitchen Stories
Kitchen Stories provides you with recipes adorned with media and detailed with simple instructions. The media includes how to videos and simply gorgeous food photographs along with intermittent food related articles. Kitchen Stories is probably the best presented cooking app with a great interface from which you can select recipes and add your notes to them.
Get Kitchen Stories for iOS | Get Kitchen Stories for Android
6) Chefsteps
Chefsteps is another feature rich app that has a great list of recipes along with tips, tricks and hints. The articles are well written with clear steps and this is matched equally by the videos which making the whole process seem quite natural and conversational. Along with direct recipes, there are other interesting points provided such as food hacks and food variety.
Download Chefsteps for iOS
7) Allrecipes – Dinner Spinner
Allrecipes comes with a near exhaustive collection of recipes that are accompanied with individual ratings given by this app’s dynamic community. Dinner Spinner lets you tap into the community nicely by syncing into the Recipe Box on Allrecipes along with offering you lots of videos with step by step cooking details. It also has an advanced search feature to make your life easier.
Download Allrecipes for iOS | Download Allrecipes for Android
8) Tender
Tender is a quirky little app that lets you search and locate interesting new recipes directly from your smartphone. You get started by creating a new Tender account or with Facebook. Tender provides you with photos of different meals sourced from around the Internet. You can save recipes that you like, filter recommendations based on category and the app picks up these filtering habits for subsequent automation.
Download Tender for iOS | Download Tender for Android
9) BigOven
BigOven is one of the best recipe management apps along with a massive list of over 250000 recipes that are searchable. You can search for recipes using keywords, ingredients, course or collection. You can use the leftovers feature to list out up to 10 ingredients while using the menu planning calendar and shopping list features for better organization. You also have the option of upgrading to a paid membership for an ad-free experience.
Download BigOven for iOS | Download BigOven for Android
10) Cookpad
Cookpad is both a recipe tutorial app along with being a social network. This is because the app offers its users a ton of recipes from other users and these recipes cover a whole range of dishes. You can search for any kind of dish by the categories, ingredients, difficulty-level and diet restrictions. You can create your own shopping lists along with taking part in the active user forums for recipes.
Download Cookpad for iOS | Download Cookpad for Android
11) Food Network in the Kitchen
Food Network is so much more than a simple guide for the channel. This app offers you access to the network’s famous chefs. You can go through many recipes along media relevant to them. New additions can be found monthly. This app also offers a powerful search feature to let you search using different filters. It also offers options to view seasonal recipes, get recipes through importing them and timers for the recipe cooking.
Get Food Network for iOS | Get Food Network for Android
12) Garden Plate
Garden Plate is an app, which is primarily targeted at vegetarians. But, anyone who wants to search and explore some healthy recipes can use this app. You can add your own twist of vegetarian or non-vegetarian additives to the raw, vegan and gluten-free recipes that you find here. You can favorite specific recipes or all of them to have a glance at them whenever you require. Garden Plate offers plenty of delicious and simple recipes in its free version. Each recipe features a pretty photo of the dish. It features the ingredient list which you can take a look at and add them to your shopping list by scrolling and selecting. Though the app lacks video tutorial, it is adequate enough for foodies who prefer their food healthy.
Get Food Network for iOS | Get Food Network for Android
13) Noodler – The Noodle Soup Oracle (for iOS only)
If you love noodles and noodle soups, Noodler is a perfect fit for you. This iOS app has an anime inspired artworks along with pretty design. This app carries over three million soup combinations and recipes that arrive with a proper ingredients list and cooking steps. You can also refresh the recipe to get new combinations. The app publishers have already commenced working on an Android version, so Android users can have their fill of noodles soon
Download Noodler for iOS
14) Epicurious (for iOS only)
Epicurious is the grand curator of recipes from throughout the Internet. This app extracts recipes from various corners of the web and lists them in one place. You can search for recipes listed under different categories such as kids’ recipe, dish type, occasion specials, etc. Every recipe is detailed with images, list of ingredients and how to instructions. You can favorite the ones you like for later reference. Along with these features, there comes a smart timer to let you know when your dishes are done.
Download Epicurious for iOS
Now start cooking some finger-licking delicacies at home!