Best cooking apps for the iPad

There are so many apps available today, both paid for and free, for smartphones and tablets, including the iPad. However, some apps lend themselves to the iPad more than others and ones that relate to cooking, offering food tips, recipes and online cooking demos are just some of them. Here we discuss the best cooking apps for the iPad so the next time you are trying to decide what to have for dinner, do not reach for the cookbook, reach for the iPad instead.

Shopping apps

Before you can even begin cooking you will need to go food shopping and there are many recipe apps out there that will help you compile your shopping list so you know what to buy for the dishes you plan to make. One of the best food apps that is free to download is Epicurious. This includes thousands of recipes and it even has the functionality for you to search for recipes based on what is in your fridge. However, if you are simply choosing recipes then the app will make a shopping list for you based on the recipes you have chosen. An alternative is Cooks Illustrated which also allows you to create shopping lists for the recipes you are planning to cook.

Recipe apps

One of the most popular recipe apps is the All Recipes.com dinner spinner. It allows you to choose the type of dish, be it a main, side dish or dessert as well as the ingredients you want to use and the length of cooking time that you have available. The Big Oven app holds more than 250,000 recipes and will also enable you to find recipes and ideas based on the items that you have in your cupboards or fridge. If you prefer your recipes to be healthy then an app such as the one from SparkRecipes.com could be the one for you. As well as the great number of recipes that are available (over 180,000) the app also allows you to find recipes based on the number of calories and ethnicity of the dishes. If you are a creative cook then developing your own recipes is a great way of.

Interactive cooking apps

As with the regular recipe apps there are also a number of cooking apps that are interactive. These include the one from SparkRecipes.com (referred to above), which includes videos from which you can learn some new cooking techniques. Another interactive cooking app is the Evernote food app, which as well as providing you with many different recipes, also tells you where the best new restaurants are and allows you to upload and share photos of the food you are eating. The Big Oven app (referred to above) also has an interactive element as it allows you to add other recipes you may have found online by pasting the URL into the Big Oven website. Hopefully this has inspired you to use your iPad in the kitchen as a source of great recipes, hints, tips and video demonstrations.