Find New Recipes With These 5 Cooking Apps
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The best home-cooked meals start with a good recipe. And while it's great to make staple recipes from your cookbooks, eventually, you'll want to branch out. You could grab a new cookbook or search for recipes on the Internet but there's another way. Enter the cooking app.
At their most basic, cooking apps are vast recipe libraries that fit in your pocket. You can search for recipes by ingredient, cuisine, budget, and more. The best apps add features like cooking classes, video guides, digital recipe boxes, and grocery delivery. But, like cookbooks and online recipes, there are countless cooking and recipe apps available.
Here are five of the best.
1. NYT Cooking
The New York Times has a vast archive of recipes, all located under the NYT Cooking banner. Along with recipes, the cooking section features video guides that teach various techniques, tips, and tricks, such as “How to Stock a Modern Pantry” and “How to Make Bagels.” There's also a recipe box where you can save recipes from the Times and other sites. You can find all of these features on the Times site or the separate NYT Cooking app. One important note: an NYT Cooking subscription is separate from a digital or print subscription to the paper itself.
Price: NYT Cooking is $5 a month or $40 per year.
2. BigOven
BigOven is essentially a giant digital cookbook. Its three main features are a library of recipes, a meal planner, and a grocery list. As a pure recipe app, it's one of the best with more than a million recipes on the platform. As a recipe app, BigOven is one of the best because it supports recipes from other sources. You can clip online recipes with the BigOven Clipper and upload recipes from your physical cookbooks with RecipeScan. Other features include editorial content, community recipes, and recipes designed to help you use your leftovers and reduce food waste.
Price: The ad-supported version of BigOven is free. BigOven Pro removes ads and includes more organization, content, and nutrition tools. That version is $2.99 a month or $24.99 a year.
3. Tasty
Tasty started life as a Buzzfeed video series and has become one of the Internet's largest cooking and recipe sites. While food videos are still Tasty's bread and butter, the site also features recipes, tips, tricks, and guides to help you learn or improve your cooking skills.
The Tasty app functions as a mobile version of the website, making it easy to access recipes and videos on the go (or while cooking!). You can filter by ingredient and cuisine and save them to your recipe book. Tasty's app is not as feature-rich as some competitors but it is free.
Price: $0
4. SideChef
SideChef is unique among cooking apps. It combines the recipes and meal planning of BigOven with the grocery ordering, delivery and pickup features of apps like Instacart and DoorDash. SideChef's meal plans are personalized. You can create plans based on parameters like healthy eating, budget, and more. The grocery ordering feature is free, though it's worth mentioning that SideChef's only partner is Walmart. The app's paid version, SideChef premium, includes exclusive recipes and cooking classes.
Price: The basic version of SideChef is free and features over 8,000 recipes. SideChef premium is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year.
5. Forks Plant-Based Recipes
Forks Plant-Based Recipes is the cookbook and recipe arm of Forks Over Knives. It includes recipes, meal plans, cook courses, and guides. The meal planning feature is in-depth and customizable, though it costs $9.99 a month. With that said, there are few better places to start if you're interested in a plant-based diet.
The Forks Plant-Based Recipes app is similar to the Tasty app. It's a mobile version of the website featuring recipes, shopping lists, and step-by-step instructions. The app includes 600 recipes, which is fairly small compared to other recipe apps.
Price: Forks Plan-Based Recipes is free.
A cooking app isn't the only app worth having on your phone. If you're looking for more, check out Optimum's guides to the best smart home, budget, and travel apps.
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