The internet is ripe with foodie smartphone apps. Team lovefood has downloaded dozens between them – here are our 10 favourites.
Essential for shoppers who care about where their meat comes from. Simply locate the oval-shaped EU Identification Mark on the label (every packet of meat sold in a supermarket has one) and punch the code into the App. Where’s This From will automatically pull up the relevant data published by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) – that includes the name, location and activities of the operator, so you can even see where the animal was slaughtered. Plus it will tell you whether an operator is ‘good’, ‘adequate’, ‘weak’ or ‘poor’ in terms of hygiene processes and animal welfare.
Price: Free
Having trouble with your Sunday roast? Then Time to Roast is the app for you. You can calculate the exact cooking time for your roast chicken, lamb, beef, goose or whatnot, simply by entering the type of meat and its weight. Chose ‘medium rare’ or ‘well done’, and there are even timed alarms available to keep your basting on track.
Price: £0.69
Following a recipe can be tricky if you don’t have pictures to help. The Photo Cookbook is ‘like a private cooking course in your own kitchen’ – every recipe (there are 84 in total) starts with a photograph of all the ingredients, then illustrates each short step whilst you cook. Choose from the ‘Quick and Easy’, ‘Asian’, ‘Italian’ or ‘Baking’ categories.
Price: £2.49
Have you noticed those green signs on the front door of eateries, giving a mark out of five for hygiene? It’s good to know for us diners, but pretty pointless if you only discover that the restaurant you’re eating at scores 2/5 at the last minute, when you turn up for a table. Food Hygiene lets you search for ratings from the comfort of your own home, bringing together over 400,000 official local authority food hygiene inspection ratings. We checked out our nearby stretch of caffs, pubs and restaurants, and were unpleasantly surprised by the results…
Price: Free
Perfect for people on a diet, Foodle compiles nutrition facts on over 8,000 different foods – that includes calorific content and the vitamin/mineral composition. There’s information on fruits, veg, grains, meat, dairy, seafood, nuts and even spices, and a ‘nutrient browser’ sorts foods by nutritional content, highlighting the healthiest foods at the top of the list. All data is provided by the USDA National Nutrient Database.
Price: Free
We’ve had a lot of fun with this one. The Riverford app contains over 770 searchable recipes inspired by the team’s Field Kitchen restaurant, and the recipes they write for their organic vegbox scheme. It works like a fruit machine... if you’ve got carrots, peas and peppers in your fridge, the spinning machine will churn out recipes which require those very ingredients.
There’s also information available on how to store and prepare veg, and you can save your favourite recipe too.
Price: Free
Want to make the same recipes that Britain’s eight favourite chefs do? Mary Berry, Madhur Jaffrey, Rick Stein, Antonio Carluccio, Ken Hom, Ainsley Harriot, Annabel Karmel and Rosemary Conley have clubbed together to create this golden recipe collection, developed by Random House publishing group. My Kitchen Table boasts hundreds of dishes, and iPhone 4/4s users can activate the revolutionary touch-free mode – perfect for when your hands are covered in flour.
Price: £1.99
We all judge a recipe by how it looks. So instead of offering you words, foodgawker shows images of recipes submitted by food bloggers from around the world instead, Pinterest style. The foodgawker editors review hundreds of entries every day and choose the highest quality, most appealing photographs to showcase. If you like the look of it, just click on the image and you’ll be sent to the relevant blog post for the accompanying recipe.
Price: Free
Hugely popular, and you probably already have it. But just in case you don’t, FoodSpotting is all about finding and rating dishes, as opposed to restaurants. Just enjoyed an incredible ice cream sundae and want to share it with the world? Your sundae would be one of over 2 million images on the app, which was first launched in January 2010. You can also find exactly what you’re craving for, and see which dish is best at any restaurant.
Price: Free
Making your own sushi is tricky when you’re starting from scratch. Teach me Sushi offers a visual guide to making sushi, starting with the very basics (how to make rice) and going all the way up to ‘special’ rolls. Each lesson is no longer than five minutes long, and there are 13 videos in total. There’s also an inbuilt map based on your GPS position of the nearest Japanese supermarket – clever!
Price: £2.99
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