Apps are a useful tool around the kitchen. Here are two dozen useful and free offerings for you to try out.
Keeping your smartphone or tablet handy in the kitchen can be very useful. You can avoid printing out recipes, watch a step-by-step instruction video, look up tips online, and keep a host of apps to hand to help you navigate your next meal.
There are apps for inexperienced cooks covering food hygiene and essential skills, handy weight converters and nutrition guides and, for those really lazy nights, takeaway menus.
We've picked out 24 free apps we think are well worth having to hand.
Just be careful not to drop or leave your hardware anywhere wet or messy!
100 Cakes & Bakes
This app comes with 100 recipes for cakes, biscuits, brownies, and other sweet bakes that will keep you going for some time.
Download now
Dough Pro
Everything you need to know to make bread, including detailed instructions for over 50 recipes from bloomer loaves to flatbreads. You can select the number of batches you want to produce and the app will multiply the ingredient quantities for you, and you can also add and share your own recipes.
Download now
Culinary Cooking Essentials
A handy notepad that comes with a culinary dictionary, walking you through terms from ‘al dente’ to ‘zabaglione’, and a weight and measure converter. It also links (you need a web connection to use this feature) to nearly 100 videos demonstrating kitchen skills, including knife sharpening, sauce making and portioning.
Download now
Weight Conversion
There are a few free weight converters around, but this one is handy as it automatically converts your inputted measure into many other measurements: grams, pounds and ounces, newtons, and so on. Perhaps a little too technical than necessary for most cookery situations, but you can just move ounces and grams to the top of the page with a tap and see your conversion easily.
Shopping List
A simple app for keeping your shopping list on. You can add items using text, voice or barcode scanning, though the third option requires the installation of a separate barcode scanning app, and won’t work if the item isn’t in the database.
Download now
Evernote Food
This app comes loaded with plenty of recipes which you can save to your own ‘cookbook’, as well as the ability to save your favourite restaurants, and compare review ratings of the food establishments close to you.
Download now
Good Fish Guide
When shopping for fish, flavour and freshness are important factors to consider, but so is sustainability. Before you buy, find fish using the free app from the Marine Conservation Society and see whether or not it’s an at-risk species. Eat fish rated 1 or 2, but think twice about anything further down the scale.
Download now
Food Hygiene Ratings
Going out for dinner? Before you pick a restaurant, check the hygiene rating using this app, which is updated nightly using the Food Standards Agency’s ratings and places them on an interactive map. A ‘5’ is great, ‘0’ is avoid at all costs.
Download now
Just Eat
For those occasions when you really, really can’t be bothered to cook after a long day. Filter takeaways by cuisine and distance, as well as by user rating. It will also send notifications of your order progress to your phone if you want it to.
Download now
Zomato
Popular restaurant review app that lets you view menus and photos from restaurants, cafés and bars nearby, or further if you enter a specific area. Community ratings are aggregated into a score out of five, and the approximate cost for a meal for two are supplied, so you can get an idea of the price and quality in a given establishment.
Download now
Meat Temperature Guide
A useful list of target temperatures for meat – you need a meat probe to record these (remember to clean your probe properly between taking temperatures). Pick the type of meat you’re cooking and you’ll be given target temperatures for cooking your meat between rare and well done. Particularly handy for barbecues.
Download now
Is My Food Safe?
A handy app with safe cooking temperatures (target core temperatures) for a range of foods, and a guide to storing food and how long it will keep in the fridge and freezer. These temperatures are in Farenheit, but you can always convert it with another app if you don’t have a thermometer with that unit. Good for inexperienced home cooks who aren’t quite sure yet.
Download now
Kitchen Spices
A simple reference guide to herbs and spices used in the kitchen, along with breakdowns of their common uses by region and dish. The app pictures, describes and gives an idea for use for each herb and spice, and although it isn’t the best looking piece of software it does the job.
Download now
Kitchen Stories
Lots of recipes, with fresh ideas added on a weekly basis, videos on knife skills, everyday basics and more, and a built-in shopping list function. Keep track of your favourites with a tap and the recipes come with how-to videos to0, making them easy to follow when you’re unsure. Plus there's some lovely photography!
Download now
I’m Hungry: Vegetarian Recipes
Vegetarian recipes aggregated from a range of sites. More are added on a regular basis. It’s handy to have them all in one place, even if they’re not completely original. Recipes are categorised into cuisines and meals: appetisers, entrée and so on, so it’s possible to narrow your search to a specific theme.
Download now
Is it Vegan?
Despite the name, this app can actually check whether or not a given food is vegetarian as well. This is useful in the case of cheeses, some of which are vegetarian friendly while others are not.
A good fast check to see whether or not the food on the shelf is vegetarian – though you could check the ingredients on the box to be sure. You can also scan the barcode of a product if you’re not sure, but if it’s not covered by the database, you still can’t tell without further questions. A quarter of advertising revenue is donated to animal rights organisations.
Download now
Food Planner
Enter recipes manually, or import them from your favourite websites, then plan out your week in meals. Also keeps a grocery list which can be manually entered or scanned using barcodes, and you can add and update prices to give you an overview of your approximate expenditure on meals.
Download now
Perfect Brew: Tea Timer
Drag and drop your chosen onscreen teabag into the virtual cup while you pop in your real teabag at the same time. When the timer hits zero, both will be perfect. Comes with lots of facts about various kinds of tea, and timings for tea from oolong to rooibos.
Download now
Gardroid
A guide to growing your own vegetables, including sowing and harvesting times, depth to sow seeds, suitable soil types for different plants and the time they’ll take to grow. There’s a paid version which includes herbs as well.
Download now
Nose to Tail
See where your favourite cuts of meat come from with this simple app, which gives a good description of each cut of beef and you can see which dishes each cut is recommended for use in – but you must buy the paid version to see the same for chicken, lamb and pork.
Download now
Nutrition Lookup
Search for a food or scan a barcode on a package and be presented instantly with a breakdown of calorie and nutrient content. Useful for those with specific dietary requirements or people watching their weight.
Download now
MyFitnessPal
If you’re keeping an eye on your diet, you may find MyFitnessPal useful. You can set a calorie target to lose, gain or maintain your current weight, and then scan the items you eat throughout the day and see if you’re on target. Keep a diary of the food you eat and track your progress.
Download now
Food Allergy Restaurant Finder
Though from the title you might assume it’s just for avoiding allergens, it can also help you find a specific cuisine, or food that is halal or kosher and so on. There are also translations to help you inform waiters abroad about your allergies – but the downside to this is that languages which use different alphabets aren’t available in Latin script.
Download now
Vivino Wine Scanner
Take a photo of a bottle of wine, or the wine list at a restaurant, and find ratings and reviews from over 10 million users. Find the wine on the shelves in the store down the road and see if they’ve got anything decent, and at what price. Or scan the bottles yourself when you pop in. Easy.
Download now
In-app purchases
These apps are all free, but most have some kind of paid-for option, whether that be a one-off payment to remove advertisements or an actual extension to the app offering new features.
It's up to you whether to make such a purchase, but if you're cooking with young children it may be wise to set up your device to make sure they won't be able to make the purchase on your behalf.
Do you have any apps you use all the time? Let us know in the Comments below (no spam please).
All images are screenshots taken from respective applications. Some have been edited for publication purposes.
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