There’s no shortage of cooking apps on a mobile device near you these days, but why clutter your connected kitchen, or your brain, with a whole bunch of them that you don’t really use? Here are five of the very best apps available today, for saving time and adding inspiration in the kitchen.
1. BigOven
Free, Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Kindle Fire or $15 Pro

With more 250,000 recipes, BigOven serves up a healthy portion of brand new concoctions and interesting twists on classics for just about every appetite. It also features drag-and-drop recipes into a calendar for a day, a week, or a month. If you fork over $15 for the Pro version, the app automatically generates your grocery list for you. You can also share recipes via email, Facebook or Twitter. There’s a reason why more than eight million people have downloaded this app – it’s kind of like the King Kamehameha of cooking.

2. Panna App
Free to download on iPhone and iPad, then $15 per year subscription

For true video-magazine style food porn, take a look at the new Panna App. It’s a real foodies cooking app in the form of a beautifully designed and rendered digital multi-media magazine. You can sort recipes and how-to videos by cuisine or by a chef’s name. You can also add ingredients to a shopping list with a quick one-tap button.

3. The ChefTap Recipe App
Free, Android

Remember the old days, when we tore recipes out of magazines, wrote them down on index cards, and cluttered our kitchens with sticky, stained, and faded notes? The ChefTap Recipe App for Android fixes all of that. It lets you import any recipe from any website or blog. See something awesome on Pinterest? Pull it in. Want to bookmark a favorite via Epicurious, Food Network or AllRecipes? No problem, there’s never too many cooks in the ChefTap’s kitchen. It can even scan your phone’s bookmarks and import recipes from food blogs you’ve saved, if that’s more your cup of tea.

4. Cook4Lyfe
$1.99, iOS

Got a handful of ingredients in the fridge, but not sure how to put them together into a good meal? The Cook4Lyfe App will come to your rescue. It recommends recipes from a library of over 40,000 based on what you already have on hand, (mustard, cheese, asparagus … hmmm…) or sends you to a nearby grocery store based on what you need. You can even set dietary filters for gluten free or low-fat recipes.

5. Matthew Kenney’s Everyday Raw Express
$2.99 Android, iOS

Ironically, one of the cooking apps getting a ton of buzz right now, is for food that’s … “raw.” Matthew Kenney’s Everyday Raw Express features more than 50 healthy and quick raw food recipes with videos, photos and nutritional data also included. 


If all else fails, there’s always the Chefs Feed AppCooking Apps. It tells you where the pros go when they need someone else to cook a great meal for them.

What are some of your favorite go-to cooking apps? What are some of the apps you still want to see? So you like cooking with your tablet or your Smartphone better? Be sure to let us know in the comments section!

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