5 best recipe apps for whatever (and however) you want to cook

With a decent recipe app, you can instantly convert your smartphone or tablet into a veritable library of cookbooks. We’ve tried and tested five fabulous free recipe apps that together offer you well over 100,000 recipes from all around the world. 

Many of these also give you the ability to save recipes you want to make, allow you to easily create shopping lists of the exact ingredients you need, and even let you shop for the ingredients with integrated purchasing abilities. 

Here, in alphabetical order, are our favorite free recipe apps.   

The BBC Good Food app is a British option, so you’ll need to convert the measurements to U.S. versions, but if you can handle that, this is a really well-designed app with a clean user interface and a wealth of high-quality recipes, many of which are from popular celebrity chefs such as Gordon Ramsey and Mary Berry. 

You can browse and search through the thousands of BBC Good Food recipes, save recipes into your personalized recipe folder, and create collections of recipes based on whatever themes you choose. This app also has a clever and useful “Cook Mode,” which means the screen will stay on so you can see the recipe details without having to touch your phone or tablet with messy hands. 

Conde Nast’s Epicurious is a fantastic digital food-themed resource. This app gives you the ability to explore more than 35,000 tested recipes from publishers like Bon Appetit, Gourmet, HarperCollins, and more. There’s new content added every day from the Epicurious website, so you can keep up to date with food trends and see fresh video content.

 If you sign in to the app, you can use the “Recipe Box,” which lets you save your favorite recipes. There’s also a shopping list tool, a seasonal ingredients section, and a smart kitchen timer tool that gives you cooking times for multiple food items. 

The Food Network Kitchen app is designed especially for use on a tablet, but it does also work on smartphones. The free version of this app gives you unlimited access to more than 80,000 trusted recipes from Food Network chefs like Tom Kerridge and Rachel Khoo. 

An integrated shopping list feature means you can turn all the ingredients you need for a certain recipe into an Amazon Fresh order. If you pay $20 for the premium version, you can choose from 50-plus live classes each week taught by your favorite Food Network stars, culinary experts, award-winning chefs, cookbook authors, and surprise celebrity guests. And you can easily save recipes from any show to your recipe library.

Kitchen Stories offers thousands of free recipes, HD instructional videos, and articles about cooking and baking. Via the app you can publish your own recipes to share with Kitchen Stories’ global community of home cooks. Once you’ve set up your personal profile, you can save your favorite recipes in personalized cookbooks.

This app has a “cooking mode” that guides you through recipes in a step-by-step process. You can use this app’s measurement converter to easily adapt ingredient measurements according to serving size servings and plan your grocery shop with automatically generated shopping lists that integrate with your phone’s reminders. 

You have to sign up to use the SideChef app, but it has a wealth of content you can’t get elsewhere, so it’s worth it. This app offers thousands of curated recipe collections and meal plans for inspiration. 

There are 18,000 step-by-step recipes that you can filter by diet and preferences such as how long the recipes take or how many calories they contain, search by ingredients, create a grocery list, and U.S. users can instantly shop ingredients on Walmart and Amazon Fresh. You can use the app’s meal planning tool to select recipes for the week. This app also gives you the ability to remotely control your compatible smart appliances with 2,000-plus CookAssist-enabled smart recipes.