11 Cooking Apps You Need To Download Right Now

Mastering the cuisine art can be a tricky task, good thing technology’s got our back!

Traditional books will always be a treasure, but cooking apps simplify our joyous kitchen time with step-by-step instructions, weekly meal plans, and infinite recipe possibilities at the tip of your fingers. They make everything so easy and delicious!

Here are some of the best ones I’ve found for both iOS and Android. Most of them are free, with in-app purchases.

1. Kitchen Stories

Everything you need to prepare a meal in one place. Elegant, minimalist design makes it easy to use along beautiful visuals, which include text, photos, and easy video tutorials. The regularly updated recipe database is one of their strong features, available to filter by theme or country, which you can save or organize into a cookbook.  

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS

Via Herr Becker

2. Yummly Recipes & Recipe Box

Creators define themselves as your smart cooking sidekick.  It is like a gorgeous digital cookbook that searches for recipes throughout the web offering personalized guidance and recommendations with helpful and pretty visuals. You can select between different cooking techniques, use the calorie counter, and even adjust it to your dietary preferences based on disliked foods, diet type, or allergies. Ads may be a little too much, but the shopping list feature, nutritious information, and content for inspiration are worth it

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS / Windows Phone

Via Google Play

3. Food Network In The Kitchen

It is literally the network’s chefs on your phone. Here you can find over 50,000 easy-to-follow recipes from Rachel Ray, Bobby Flay, Alton Brown, Guy Fieri and many other cooking stars that will guide you to perfection through beautifully curated videos and photos. One of the great things about the app is the unit converter, the timer and that you can personalize the recipes with your own notes or substitutions.

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS

Via Webby Awards

4. BigOven

A massive library, adding your own recipes, and meal planning are just a few of the great features inside Big Oven. It also includes a social feature for those who like sharing with friends are family or following your favorite food bloggers or cooks.

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS

Via Spin Your Fire

5. Youmiam

This is a must have for every millennial out there! It is simple, attractive, fresh and a lot like a social network dedicated to cooking. It is like an Instagram but with a step-by-step recipe slide shows with a Pinterest-style system where you follow users to enrich your feed, share content, and save your favorites.

The search engine is my favorite part because it looks like Tinder for recipes (You literally swipe right or left) and you can also use hashtags, trends or type whatever ingredients you’ve got in the fridge. Also, the shopping list is available offline.

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS 

Via Itunes

6. Tastemade

You probably already know Tastemade from one of their how-to videos on social media, but I bet you didn’t know they have a pretty awesome app to dig into its archives, save your favorite dishes for later, discover new posts or share them. You can also watch travel shows.

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS

Via Yecid Sanmartin

7. Epicurious

Created by Conde Nast, the app provides over 35,000 tested and approved recipes from notable gourmet publications with editorial quality photos, text, and videos. Epicurious offers a kitchen timer, seasonal ingredients finder, and recently added a hands-free cook mode. It also allows you to create shopping lists, browse by skill level, cuisine type, or ingredients.

Price: Free

Available:  iOS 

Via Fellswoop

8. Allrecipes Dinner Spinner

It is quite friendly, but the main difference on this app is that recipes come from a community of over 30,000 home cooks. Allrecipes comes with all the other usual features, but if you allow it to use your location, it can tell you which recipe ingredients are on sale or suggest a recipe when you walk into certain stores.

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS / Windows 

Via Allrecipes

9. SideChef

Named by The New York Times as their favorite cooking app; I have to admit it is the best option for amateur chefs or anyone willing to learn new skills and flavors. Once you decide from an extensive selection of hand-picked recipes from food bloggers and chefs, Sidechef will walk you step-by-step using voice guidance and automatic timers. Just like a GPS would!

Price: Free

Available: Android / iOS 

Via SideChef

10. Yes, Chef!

Invented by Chris Maury, the French app offers a collection of more than 350,000 recipes from users and food publications. It is fun and quite pretty, but the amazing twist is that it is the first completely voice-controlled app of its kind, delivering cooking instructions, talking you through the process, and answering questions out loud so you can use those hands to cook instead of checking your phone constantly. How awesome is that?

Price: Free

Available: iOS

Via Conversant Labs

11. Forks Over Knives

From the creators of the acclaimed documentary about changing our diets to improve our health, the app intends to demonstrate being a vegetarian is not boring or difficult at all!  It offers more than 300 whole food, plant-based recipes with easy instructions, mouth-watering pictures, weekly planning and a great shopping list feature. Being healthy has never been easier!

Price: $4.99

Available: AndroidiOS

Via Lani Muelrath

 

Now go impress everyone with your new techy cooking skills!

Via Refinary29

 Featured Image via Unsplash