Whether it's on a tablet or from your mobile phone, cooking with Android is a powerful tool. The Market is teeming with apps to help you out with timings and conversions along with more recipe guides than you can possibly imagine. So, whether it's tips from a professional chef or putting your trust in the web community at large (good luck), here are the very best Android cooking apps out there; ones we prepared earlier, you might say.
BigOven
On the whole, free cookery apps are not as good but one that really can compete is BigOven. You still get features like automatic unit conversions between metric and imperial, shopping lists and recipes based on ingredients you have, but where it suffers are things like adverts and a slightly slow, connected-only experience.
On the plus side, you do get access to over 170,000 recipes with plenty of user-generated information including review comments and photos and such too. It'll also even tell you just how many calories are in each serving right at the very top.
QTimer
We don't know what the timer app is like on your particular Android phone's UI but we do know that there's a huge amount of variation. Some are good, some not so good and some buried a little too deep inside clocks and alarms. Whatever the case, QTimer is well worth a download just in case it's better than yours.
First up, it's free, but the good stuff is that you can very quickly set as many timers going concurrently and name them all in the process. So, perfect for a Sunday roast or fry up, you can set stopwatches for all of your pots, pans, dishes and trays with each one telling you that time's up rather than having to do the maths on your watch all the time. Simple but effective.
Healthy Recipes
Much like BigOven and Recipe Search below, Healthy Recipes is a familiar format that uses the SparkRecipes website as its database. The twist here, however, is that all of the recipes listed are supposed to be healthy, or at least not bad for you, anyway. So that you can decide for yourself, each dish comes listed with calories, fat content, protein, carbs and fibre measurements even before you click through to see what it's all about.
Currently, there's only 150 recipes listed on the app but they certainly are an interesting sounding bunch with the Jalapeno Boats, Crock Pot Taco Soup and Diet Pop Cake among those we're keen to give a whirl. If you like what you try, then there's also the opportunity to share and even add to your favourites as well.
Jamie's 20 Minute Meals
Love him or hate him, Jamie Oliver and his team have put a very decent app together to bring smartphone users 60 different recipes to try. Now, that's not a lot for the fairly hefty £5.99 download fee but it's the added content that makes this one stand out.
You get videos with Jamie himself teaching you a few tricks like how to chop an onion properly or how to fry steaks or cook perfect pasta along with guidance on what your meal should look like. As well as that, there's shopping lists and ingredients searches too. You might have to buy certain bits of equipment that Jamie expects you to own first but the big advantage of this recipe book app is, of course, that each one should only take you 20 minutes.
Recipe Search
Another of the community cookery site apps that's well worth a browse is Recipe Search which leverages the All The Cooks website. This time it's a choice of around 70,000 recipes augmented with the usual comments, reviews and, where you're lucky, photos of what it is that you're supposed to be making, give or take the tasteless, heavy-pattern crockery.
The adverts are a little less invasive than BigOven but swap the orangey background for green and you've basically got it. Again, there's automatic unit conversion and shopping lists which you can create at the click of ingredients. More trust required than the paid for, pro chef apps, but definitely worth an experiment or two.
Cooking Conversions
Recipes are all well and good but it can get rather confusing if they start quoting ingredients in either units you don't understand or simply can't measure. That's where a decent conversions app comes in and, although we've chosen to go with Cooking Conversions,Recipe Convert will do just fine as well. Both are a touch confusing to begin with but they'll offer just about anything you can think of in the way of weight and volume units and switch from one to the other as fast as you can type.
Beyond that, they'll also help with the classic Fahrenheit to Centigrade mental gymnastics as well as account for when a recipe says that it's fit for 4 people but you're actually trying to cook for a different number of guests. Lastly, Cooking Conversions offers quite a handy list of substitute ingredients in case you don't happen to quite have everything you need in your pantry. A must.
Epicurious Recipes
This app has been produced by the award-winning food site Epicurious.com and includes over 28,000, professionally tested recipes. It should prove dab handy for those of you who want to eat a little healthier or become a bit more adventurous with your nosh. Features include the ability to browse a list of "most popular" recipes, which are categorised for different occasions and you can also filter your search by swiping through icons, enabling you to find recipes which are healthy, in season or simply what's in your fridge.
There's also the ability to take a look at what other Epicurious members are plating up, so if you like surprises then it'll certainly give you the chance to experiment, whilst a personal favourites list means you can keep track of successful meals. Tablets can also offers a few extras like a full screen cookbook view, and a snazzy interface, but both seem like very decent propositions and more
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