Best Recipe Manager for Android
If you’re emailing yourself recipes, printing them out, or still keeping index cards, there is a better way. Grab your Android phone, there are tons of great recipe apps out there, but we have one that we think is the right mix of features at a reasonable price. Paprika is the app for you.
Paprika
Platform: Android (and iOS , Windows , Mac ) Price: $ 4.99 Download page.
Functions
- Automatically download recipes with one tap from recipe sites on the Internet or from your phone’s clipboard
- Create your own recipes
- Built-in browser to search for recipes on supported sites
- Browser clipboard view for clipping recipes from unsupported websites
- Smart view of recipes so you don’t lose your place
- Built-in timers and screen lock so the display stays on while you cook.
- Securing a recipe when dealing with multiple meals
- Custom categories and the ability to assign one recipe to multiple categories.
- Personalized notes section
- Easy recipe scaling
- A smart product list that combines ingredients needed for multiple recipes and organizes them by aisle
- Search for recipes by name, ingredient, or source
- Meal planning with a choice of week and month
- Easily share recipes with other paprika users
- Cloud sync between supported devices
- Offline access to stored recipes
- Bookmarklet support importing recipes from your desktop computer as well as with other desktop recipe managers
Where is it best
Like its iOS cousin , the best thing about Paprika is that it does everything a recipe clipper is supposed to do, plus some more. Whether you use the built-in Paprika browser to search for recipes and add them manually, or import recipes from unsupported sites, it is very easy to add recipes that you find online to your Paprika collection. If you’ve emailed yourself a bunch of recipes, you don’t need to do that anymore.
Once you have a decent collection of recipes, you can organize them easily. You can assign them the basic categories that the paprika suggests, such as “snacks,” “chicken,” “dinner,” and so on, or you can give them your own category names and organize them into folders as you see fit. However, these folders are a bit like Gmail shortcuts, so a recipe can exist in more than one instance at a time, which is really nice. Likewise, if you find recipes on your desktop that you want to save in Paprika, you can add them yourself or use the browser bookmarklet mentioned above to add them without taking out your Android phone or tablet. It is necessary to create this collection of recipes without stopping and grabbing another device to do it.
The best feature of Paprika, however, is the built-in timers and tools that allow you to cook and monitor the app while you actually cook your dish. Whether you need to prepare a dish – or lunch – for a crowd larger than the recipe’s intended, or you feed two and the recipe is geared towards the army, Paprika can count for you and save you a lot of effort. figure out what can and cannot scale in a recipe.
Likewise, Paprika lets you plan your meals ahead of time for those interested in relieving the stress of dining out any evening, and the app quickly brings together everything you need for those meals into a handy grocery list that’s actually bundled into packages. flour and amount of eggs, instead of other apps where you have five items on your shopping list for different amounts or eggs, cup-sized flours, etc.
All in all, Paprika is one of the most feature rich cooking apps available for Android. It boasts all the recipe management features you could need and syncs across devices. In this respect, he is almost flawless in how simple and organized he is. Cooking timers and calculators are the icing on the cake and can come in handy if you enjoy recipe cooking. However, in addition to this, the rest of the application’s functions are bonuses.
Where it fails
Unfortunately, Paprika lags behind its iOS cousin, which is clearly obvious when you try them side-by-side (or check out Google Play reviews for that matter). Some basic features that might be important are flagship features in iOS. versions – missing from Android, for example the ability to have multiple “pinned” recipes so you can quickly switch between main course and sides for your fabulous Thanksgiving dinner. Finding the recipes when they are organized again can be tricky too, so if you have thousands of recipes it can be tricky to scroll through all of these categories and then scroll through all the recipes to find the one you’re looking for. The built-in in-app search is designed to search for new recipes, not the ones you already have.
Oh, and we have to mention that the “pantry” feature that the iOS version loves so much is also missing from Android, which means you can use Paprika to organize your shopping list, but it’s not that useful for keeping track of what you have. already there, so you don’t buy things that were already in the closet at home, and this is a shame.
Another note: the app doesn’t really make it easy to export your data, so if that’s important to you, you can also email your recipes to yourself so you have a backup. Speaking of business things, yes, one cannot fail to mention the price. The Android app costs $ 5 and works on phones and tablets. However, if you have an iPad, you will lose another $ 5, and if you have an iPhone, the app is not universal, so you will lose another $ 5. The desktop app costs $ 20, which we think is optional unless you plan on entering and archiving all your old recipes – and if that’s what you want to do, it might be helpful, but keep this backup and export note above.
Competition
We must also mention Pepperplate (Free), which is available and runs completely free on multiple platforms. It’s a serious contender and I’ve been a fan of it in the past, but it hasn’t been updated or touched in over a year (the last update was in July 2014). This is usually not a problem, but some users reported that the app does not work at all on their newer devices or newer version of Android (although, to be honest, I had no problems). It’s lighter than even paprika, but includes cooking timers, the ability to add your own recipes and import them from multiple sites, and organize them within the app. It lacks some of those nice features like adding recipes by URL or locking the screen so it doesn’t fall asleep while you’re doing something. On top of that, if you like free, cross-platform apps with the basic functionality you need to get the job done, give them a try. Your “Deal With It” level may be quite high, and that’s all you need.
Food Planner (free, $ 4 pro version ) is probably Paprika’s biggest competitor and seems to be very popular with Google Play reviewers. I found it was too much and too much for what I needed, and the app pushed pretty hard for in-app purchases, downloadable cookbooks and recipes, and other paid ecosystem stuff that just got in the way when I wanted to add recipes and get them later. That said, if you want a cooking app that partly includes recipe management, part cooking assistant, and part social networking with the recipes behind it – which Paprika is definitely missing – it’s worth trying the free version to find out. Do you like it. Food Planner has similar features for shopping list, tagging, organizing, and manual entry, and true to its name, it’s also great at helping you plan your funds ahead of time so you know what’s for dinner on any particular evening. and what to buy in the store. If you’ve tried paprika in the past and didn’t like it, or feel like you’re missing it, or too simple for your taste, Food Planner is probably for you.
If you like your recipe management apps that contain recipes to browse and search as soon as you install them, it’s worth taking a look at Yummly (free). It might cut recipes from mainstream food blogs, but good luck if what you’re looking for is on an unsupported site, or if you want to archive your grandmother’s old handwritten recipes. However, if your goal is to get inspired to cook something delicious, or you are on a special diet and want to filter dishes based on recipes that suit your eating habits, this is a great app.
BigOven (free) also claims to be the best in the department of inspiration, but expect to be underestimated in everything, including nutritional information (also pay for a prescription), unless you fork out for a ridiculously unnecessary $ 20 pro account at year. … Given that basic features like offline recipe access and reliable syncing are lacking and the user interface is a bit lacking, we recommend skipping it unless there is a specific reason why you want to try it out.