Master chef? Or want to become one? Apps are a great help in the kitchen. They can help you learn to cook, find recipes, make you a shopping list and even store and organise your recipes. Whatever your skill level, these apps will make cooking easier.
Apps to learn to cook
SideChef
Available on: Google Play, App Store
Whether you're learning to cook or looking to hone your culinary flare, SideChef is the perfect instructor. View recipes one step at a time on the screen, with voice instructions, video demos and a built-in timer for each step. There are 4,000 recipes to choose from and you can browse them by ingredient, keyword, diet, cuisine or interest. You can even save your favourite recipes to come back to.
Apps to find recipes
Yummly
Available on: Google Play, App Store
If you're looking for some new inspiration, Yummly will help with over one million recipes to choose from. If that sounds overwhelming, don't panic! Yummly matches recipes to your preferences including dietary requirements and it filters out recipes with disliked ingredients. Like the Netflix of food, Yummly also learns about your tastes over time based on recipes you add to your "yum list". Once you've found a recipe you like you can add ingredients to your shopping list with one tap. They'll be automatically organised by category and you can add more items if you have staples to thrown in like milk or bread.
Allrecipes Dinner Spinner
Available on: Google Play, App Store
This is a fun one for people who have trouble deciding what to make for dinner. As well as letting you select and sort through recipes, the Dinner Spinner will make suggestions for you if you shake your phone. The suggestions aren't completely random. You can tell it what type of meal you want (dinner, salad, etc), one key ingredient and how long you want to take in preparation. Or you can just shake with no criteria and see what happens. The Dinner Spinner also lets you favourite recipes, search by dietary needs, create an auto-categorised shopping list and it provides video instructions.
Cookpad
Available on: Google Play, App Store
Cookpad is like social network of cooking. It's a global recipe-sharing platform that lets you publish your own recipes and try out ones shared by other people. You can search for recipes by ingredient name or dish, follow individual members and even communicate with the other cooks for advice or compliments. Become part of a cooking community, discover recipes from around the world and invite your friends and family to form a cooking social network.
BigOven
Available on: Google Play, App Store
BigOven is a recipe-finder, recipe organiser, a meal planner and a social network all in one. There's half a million recipes to choose from which you can search by dish or by course. You can save recipes you find or add your own by typing, clipping from websites, scanning from a photo or uploading a file. You can create a meal calendar and a grocery list. You can create a social network with your family and friends to see what they're cooking, share recipes and grocery lists, etc. There's also a nifty Use Up Leftovers feature that will suggest recipes based on up to three ingredients of your choice. If you want suggestions based on your diet and lifestyle preferences you can get that too, but only with the Pro Membership which costs USD$24.99 per year.
Mealime
Available on: Google Play, App Store
Pitched at busy people, the focus of Mealime is on healthy meals that you can prepare in thirty minutes or less. This app takes a super organised approach. You set up a meal plan at the start of the week, it turns that into a grocery list (which you can edit and add to) and then off you go. You choose your recipes based on suggestions that take into account your dislikes and dietary preferences. Some recipes and all nutritional information are restricted to the Pro Membership which costs $68.99 per year.
Apps to organise your recipes
ChefTap
Available on: Google Play, App Store
This is an app for people who need more help organising their recipes than they do finding them. There are quite a few recipe organising apps floating around but ChefTap is one of the few that will let you save recipes from anywhere on the web, rather than a small list of pre-approved websites. But this is not just a glorified bookmark tab. The app has enough intelligence to scale recipes if you want to make more or fewer portions. You can also add ingredients to a categorised shopping list with one tap, though these features come with the pro account (USD$19.99 per year). Recipes are displayed in mobile-friendly format for easy reading. You can create a "make list" to remember what cooking you have planned. You can edit recipes or add your own recipes either by typing or from a .txt file. And you can create a staples list to remind you what items you might need to add to your shopping list.
CookBook – The Recipe Manager
Available on: Google Play, App Store
As far as cooking organisers go, this app is pretty much the Rolls Royce. And it comes with a price tag, $8.49 up-front, no free version or free trial. But it is an organised cook's dream. You can add recipes from any website or you can take a photo from a recipe book and the app will intelligently recognise text to make it mobile-friendly and interactive (we'll get to the interactive features in a tick). The app will allow you to photograph and transform ten recipes for free, then they cost between USD$0.50 and USD$0.10 per snap, depending on how many you want.
Once your recipes are in the app you can intelligently scale ingredients to make more or fewer portions. There's a meal planner which can create a grocery list based on the recipes you've chosen. And once you come to cooking you can view your recipes one step at a time in large font for easy reading. There is also an in-built cooking timer.
The app also has a leftovers feature that will search your recipes by ingredient for inspiration. You can even view your recipes offline.
Apps for grocery shopping
Out of Milk
Available on: Google Play, App Store
If all you need is a grocery list, there are plenty of apps that will help you put one together, but this is our favourite with the most comprehensive list of features. You can make multiple shopping lists and your items will be automatically organised by aisle category. You can share and sync lists with your family or friends. You can add to-do lists. And you can create a recipe book from the food website Epicurious.
One of the niftier features is you can also keep a pantry list in case you always find yourself standing in the supermarket aisle wondering if you already have chilli powder at home. And if you buy the same items regularly you can add prices to them and know what kind of bill you'll be looking at.
The app also comes with a barcode scanner to add items from your pantry to the list but unfortunately it doesn't seem to recognise Australian products. Nevertheless, a very handy addition to your phone.
FoodSwitch
Available on: Google Play, App Store
If you're trying to follow your doctor's health advice, or just generally trying to eat healthier, this Aussie app could be a great help in the supermarket. Developed by Bupa and the George Institute for Global Health Australia, with Foodswitch you can scan a barcode, get nutritional information and then suggestions for healthier alternatives. You can tell it whether you're trying to be healthier in general or if you're looking specifically for food that is low salt, low fat, low energy, low sugar or gluten-free. You can view health information for individual products as a traffic lights system highlighting low or high amounts of individual elements like energy or sugar, or you can just look at the overall health star rating.
Jacqui Dent
Editorial Strategist
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