The screen locks at the worst moment
There are two entirely separate moments in cooking from a phone. One is choosing something, which every app does well and which happens on the sofa. The other is standing at a hob with a pan going, hands wet, trying to read step four while the screen dims itself and a timer you set eight minutes ago belongs to something else. The second moment is where an app is good or useless, and almost nobody evaluates it there.
The things that matter while you are cooking
| The moment | What you need | What most apps do |
|---|---|---|
| Reading a step from a metre away | Large text, one step at a time | A dense scrolling page |
| Hands covered in food | Voice control, or a screen that stays on | A screen that locks after thirty seconds |
| Three things on at once | Several named timers | One timer, unnamed |
| Doubling the recipe | Scaling that changes the numbers in the text | A number at the top that changes nothing |
| Metric and cups in one recipe | Conversion in place | A separate search on a wet phone |
| Shopping for it beforehand | Ingredients pushed to a list | Copy and paste, twelve times |
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The apps
Cookpad. Recipes written by people who actually cook them at home rather than by a test kitchen, which makes it strong on everyday regional dishes that the glossy apps do not carry.
Tasty. Step-by-step mode with big text and short instructions, which is exactly the right shape for reading from across a counter. Free, with the recipes you have already seen as videos.
Kitchen Stories. Clear photography for each step and a consistent house style, so quantities and methods are written the same way every time. Good for anyone learning.
Paprika. The one for people who are serious about this: it captures a recipe from any website, strips the life story, scales properly and works offline. Paid once, per platform.
Samsung Food. Saves recipes from the web, plans a week and builds the shopping list from it. The strongest free option for the collect-and-plan half of the job.
BigOven. Long-established, with a useful leftovers search that takes three ingredients you already have and suggests what to do with them.
Yummly. Good at filtering by diet, allergy and what is in the cupboard, and its guided mode is comfortable to follow with the phone propped up.
SideChef. Built around step-by-step guidance with timers embedded in the steps, so the timer starts because you reached step six rather than because you remembered.
Recipe Keeper. For your own recipes rather than somebody else's: type them in once, scale them, sync them, and keep them if the app you saved them in disappears.
Mealime. Plans a week of dinners and produces a list organised by aisle. Deliberately narrow, and the better choice if planning is the part you find hard.
Multi Timer StopWatch. Several named timers at once, which is the feature every recipe app should have and most do not. The rice, the oven and the thing resting all get their own.
Unit Converter. Cups to grams, Fahrenheit to Celsius, and oven gas marks. Note that cups to grams depends on the ingredient, so use a conversion made for cooking rather than volume alone.
Bring! A shared shopping list that another person in the house can add to from their own phone while you are in the shop. Free, and the sharing works without ceremony.
Google Lens. Photograph a recipe in a book or on a card and pull the text out of it, which is how a grandmother's handwriting ends up in a searchable app.
Google Keep. The plainest place to keep the six recipes you actually cook, shared with whoever else does the cooking. No account with a recipe company and no risk of a paywall arriving later.
Markor. The same idea as plain text files in a folder you own. Unglamorous, and the version of your recipes most likely to still open in ten years.
MEATER. Only relevant if you own the thermometer, and included because the single biggest improvement to roasting meat is measuring its temperature rather than timing it.
YouTube. For technique rather than recipes. Watching somebody fold, knead or joint something once is worth more than three paragraphs describing it.
Ten minutes that make the next hundred meals easier
- Prop the phone up and out of the splash zone Any stand, a mug, a cookbook. The most common damage to a phone in a kitchen is not heat, it is something spilling on a flat screen.
- Turn on the app's keep-awake setting In the app first, and in Android's display settings if the app has none.
- Put a multi-timer app on the home screen Named timers stop the classic failure where you silence the oven alarm and forget which of the three things it belonged to.
- Save the recipe before you start, not while you cook A saved copy loads with no signal and no advertisements, and it is still there when the site rearranges itself.
- Scale the recipe before the first step Doubling halfway through is where mistakes live, particularly with salt, raising agents and baking times, which do not all double.
- Wipe the phone down afterwards, screen off A soft damp cloth, not kitchen spray. Alcohol wipes will eventually haze the screen's coating.
What an app will not fix
A recipe app cannot tell whether your oven runs hot, whether the pan is wide enough or whether the onions are actually done. Timings in recipes are written for somebody else's kitchen, which is why every experienced cook treats them as an estimate and the visual cue in the text as the instruction.
- Quantities and ratios
- Oven temperatures, as a starting point
- The order of the steps
- Resting and proving times
- Internal temperatures for meat
- How long to brown something
- Whether it is thick enough
- How much salt, at the end
- Whether the oil is hot
- The exact minute a cake is done
Choose the app for its step-by-step mode, not its photographs. Then turn on keep-awake, put named timers on the home screen and prop the phone somewhere dry.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best way to get a recipe off a website into an app?
A capture feature in the app itself, which most of the saving apps have. It fetches the ingredients and the method and discards the rest of the page, including the advertisements.
Why do cup measurements go wrong?
Because a cup is a volume and most baking depends on weight. A cup of flour varies substantially depending on how it was packed, which is why converted baking recipes fail more often than converted savoury ones.
Can I use voice control with wet hands?
Yes, and it is the underused feature here. The phone's assistant sets a named timer and reads back the next step on request, without touching the screen at all.
Should I keep my recipes in an app or in files?
Files, if they matter to you. Apps close, subscriptions arrive and export features are often poor. Plain text or a notes app you control will outlive any of these.
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