iPhone Recipe Apps

Today's post is by our favorite (and thus far, only) guest blogger, Louisa. Thanks for doing another blog entry for us Weeza :)

Greetings, gentle readers. This is another guest post by Foodie Student’s Sister (FSS). This time around, I’m reviewing four recipe apps for iPhones. (Sharp-eyed readers will notice that once again I managed to avoid doing any actual cooking…)

The four apps I reviewed are All Recipes, Betty Crocker, Big Oven, and Epicurious. All four apps are free to download from the iTunes store, and all four have corresponding websites that use (presumably) the same recipe databases as their iPhone counterparts.

I tested each app searching for mocha brownie recipes (or just brownies if no mocha variations available) and then trying a few things like marking a recipe as a favourite, and using any special features.

All Recipes

The good: Search results display in a nice-looking list with ratings and photos. Nutritional information and reviewer comments are available at the bottom of each recipe. The spinner feature is cool (see picture below). The app lets you build a list of your favourite recipes, sorted alphabetically.

The bad: All Recipes claims to have “thousands” of recipes but it’s the only app that didn’t have any recipes for mocha brownies.

The ugly: Before you can view a recipe you have to look at an ad for a few seconds. There is also a smaller ad on the recipe itself. Within a few minutes I was sick. to. death. of those ads.

Verdict: 3/5 stars (would be much higher without the ads; note, there’s no option to pay a few dollars to remove the ads, as some other apps have)

Betty Crocker

The good: All the recipes have photos and there are no ads. Yeah! The “Search by Ingredient” and “Surprise me!” (random recipe finder) features are great. Recipes include nutrition information.

The bad: The Betty Crocker app claims to have over 4,000 recipes, the lowest of the four apps. The interface feels big… big buttons, big spoon at the top of the screen, etc. It crowds out the recipes themselves a bit, which is fine for browsing, but not good if you want to read a recipe carefully.

The ugly: iPhones have a feature where if you’re scrolling down through a long screen (e.g. reading a recipe or looking through a list of search results), you can quickly jump to the top of the screen by tapping the top of the screen. The Betty Crocker app has disabled this feature, which is a real nuisance.

Verdict: 4/5 stars (would be higher if there were more recipes)

Big Oven

The good: Big Oven claims to have over 160,000 recipes, by far the most of the apps I reviewed. A few recipes include Weight Watchers points and diabetic exchanges. The app includes a food/cooking dictionary.

The bad: Many recipes don’t have photos. The search results display kind of like newspaper pages, which is a bit weird. The interface overall is just a little awkward (e.g. the home button is an “H” instead of a little house). You can’t build a favourites list unless you have an account.

The ugly: Could somebody please tell me wtf is with this ad that appeared on every page?

Verdict: 2.5/5 stars (would be higher if the app didn’t constantly push you to sign up for an account)

Epicurious

The good: The Epicurious app has a nice interface, easy to use, which is a big plus. It claims to have over 25,000 recipes, and has a reputation for good recipes.

The bad: The search feature is a bit slow, and while you wait you have to look at a full-screen ad. (Cynically, I wondered if the search is deliberately slowed down for more ad time.) The search results display one hit at a time, and you have to scroll to the side to see more search results. This makes it very hard to scan the list quickly. Many recipes don’t have photos.

The ugly: It’s great that the app has a shopping list, but: (1) You can’t export the list or add anything else to it, meaning you would have to use this in addition to any other grocery list you might have. And, (2) if you make a shopping list from multiple recipes, the common items aren’t combined. So, you’ll see “2 cups sugar” near the top of the list, then “1.5 cups sugar” again halfway down. It should either say “3.5 cups sugar” or at least put the two sugar entries together on the list.

Verdict: 3.5/5 stars (would be higher with fewer ads and better search results)

Photos:

So, out of these four apps, my favourite was the Betty Crocker one, but All Recipes would have been the champ if not for the overbearing ads. And it seems to me you would never want to follow a recipe on a tiny iPhone screen (or risk spilling food on it), so use these apps to find a good recipe, then email it to yourself to print off (all the apps had this feature).

There are lots of other recipe apps for iPhone. If you have one you really like, post it in the comments and let us know what you like about it. Thanks!

Signing off,

FSS

FS note: Uh, I have a blackberry, not an iPhone. Can you review some BB apps in a post that might actually be helpful to me?????