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11 best cooking apps and recipe apps for Android
Virtually everybody knows how to cook something. Otherwise, we’d all be starving to death. It’s an important life skill. Many of us can only make the basics like mac and cheese or peanut butter and jelly. However, there are a bunch of apps out there that can improve our capabilities in the kitchen. Here are the best cooking apps and recipe apps for Android.
We’d also like to give an honorable mention to Jow (Google Play). It’s new as of 2022 and it has a lot of potential.
The best cooking apps and recipe apps for Android
Allrecipes Dinner Spinner
Price: Free
Allrecipes Dinner Spinner is one of the most popular and consistent cooking apps. It features a lot of the basics. You can sift through tons of recipes, save your favorites, and check out mobile-friendly cooking videos. It also comes with a spinner tool. It’ll give you a prep time, a main ingredient, and the meal you’re wanting to make. You give it a spin and it gives you random ideas. There is even a shopping list built-in. It’s a little flashy and there are a few bugs here and there. Otherwise, it’s an excellent app for recipes.
See also: The best food delivery apps for Android
ChefTap
Price: Free / $19.99 per year
ChefTap Recipes is a small, but growing recipe app. It has one of the better clipper tools. You simply share a webpage with the app and it’ll automatically parse the recipe for you. It includes a bunch of recipes, a decent interface, and even support for outside sites like Pinterest. It’s also usable offline. The free account lets you save up to 100 recipes along with most features. Going pro removes the restrictions on most features. However, that does require a subscription. It’s a bit expensive, too.
Cookmate Recipe Manager
Price: Free / $20 per year
Cookmate (formerly My Cookbook) Recipe Manager is one of the more basic recipe apps. It focuses more on bookmarks than most. The idea of the app is to build your own database of recipes for quick recall. You can search for recipes you added, add your own, or borrow from websites by inputting the URL into the app. It also lets you alter them, add photos, or comments if needed. It can also do other basic stuff like syncing between devices (via Dropbox), auto-generated shopping lists, and more. The ability to scrape a recipe off of a website is a little touchy from time to time. However, even the free version of this app is outstanding as a personal cookbook app and backing up to Dropbox isn’t too difficult, although we do wish it had Google Drive support as well. This is one of the best ones, even if you just use the free version.
See also: The best meal planner apps for Android
Cookpad
Price: Free / Up to $3.49
Cookpad is one of the more social cooking apps. You and other people upload your recipes to the service. The service then shares them with everybody else. You can also save recipes for future use. It also lets you upload private recipes in case you don’t want to give up that secret family recipe. The app leans a little more toward social media than it does for cooking in a lot of spots. However, it does add a bit of unpredictable flair in a market where you see a lot of the same recipes over and over again. We also like the UI. It’s clean and simple.
Kitchen Stories
Price: Free
Kitchen Stories is one of the better free cooking apps. It features a bunch of recipes, HD video guides, step-by-step photo instructions, and how-to videos for basic kitchen tips and tricks. The app can auto-generate shopping lists and convert measurements if needed. You can also bookmark your favorite recipes for easy recall. It’s totally free so it’s difficult to really complain about what few issues the app does have. It’s clean and it should work well for most.
KptnCook
Price: Free
KtpnCook is one of the newer cooking apps on Android. It works in a much more intimate sort of way than other cooking apps. Most apps just toss you into the mix and you search for recipes. KtpnCook recommends recipes to you every day for ideas and consideration. Some of the other features include instructions with photos, tons of specific dietary recipes like vegan or high protein, and more. The search function works with emoji for those who like emoji. The app is entirely free with no in-app purchases. We like this one a lot and it should get even better over time.
Paprika Recipe Manager 3
Price: Free / Up to $4.99
Paprika Recipe Manager is another excellent recipe book style app. You add your own recipes as you choose to and you can use the ingredients list from those recipes to your shopping list for an easy reminder. The app uses a stylish Material Design style UI and you can do little extras like add photos to each recipe. The app can also scale ingredients for larger or smaller servings, set timers, and even help plan meals. You can also scrape recipes from websites, but like My CookBook, it can be finicky at times. This is another excellent one for building your own recipes.
Price: Free
Pinterest is an excellent app for a lot of interests. Finding recipes is just one of them. You can wander around and find stuff that you like. You then pin it to your profile for quick recall later. There are tons of recipes and cooking tips, tricks, and how-tos. It wont’ have a lot of the features of other cooking apps. For instance, you can’t have it auto-generate shopping lists or convert measurements easily. However, it’s a good source for some really unique stuff. This is especially good for the holiday season when people are coming up with ridiculous variants of classic recipes like Thanksgiving dinner or pumpkin-flavored things.
Tasty
Price: Free
Tasty Recipes is one of the most popular recipe pages on Facebook. Their videos are quick, catchy, and the food looks pretty good. They are also addicting to watch as entertainment and not just following a recipe. Their app gives you a faster, simpler way of accessing those recipes. The app lets you view videos, search for recipes, and it includes categories for easier discovery. For some reason, the developers like to unpublish the app and publish it again under a different name. We’re not sure why that happens. Thus, if you hit the download link and it’s not showing up, just try searching for the name in Google Play. It’s there, probably, somewhere. It’s also free with advertisements. Tasty’s YouTube channel also has a bunch of basic cooking tutorials and other entertainment-focused stuff.
Yummly
Price: Free
YouTube
Price: Free / $12.99 per month
YouTube has become an excellent place for finding recipes, learning new cooking techniques, and all kinds of weird cooking stuff. Creators like Binging with Babish, Joshua Weissman, and Adam Ragusia come up with all kinds of fun stuff for home cooks and you can find an absolute ton of tutorial videos from frying an egg to oiling your wood cutting board. Even just a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have recommended YouTube for this, but honestly, YouTube is a better spot for cooking than the Food Network these days.
If we missed any of the best cooking apps and recipe apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists.
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