Six Cooking Apps To Help You Stop Making Terrible Decisions In The Kitchen

Food apps have come a long way from 2008, when iPhones had just come out and the only thing you could download was that app where you tilted your phone to chug a frothy virtual beer. Simpler days. 

If you need a little help in the kitchen, consider these apps a safety net to ensure you don’t fuck up your meal. We can’t all have Krusty Burger within running distance, after all.

Never overcook your steak or roast again. These two apps take out the guesswork of calculating the perfect cooking time and conditions: just pick your meat cut, its weight and let it know whether you’re firing up the grill or keeping to the stove, and these apps give you a handy timer. 

SteakMate lets you pick how you like your steak too and gives you the heads up on when to give it a flip, too. There’s even a queue function to perfectly ace when one mate likes it well done (gross) while the next likes it medium rare (the only option, gang).

Cooking for a friend with an allergy or intolerance can be a drag – sure, you might be well known for your spag bowl, but how do you show off if your mate’s allergic to your super-secret ingredient? 

Enter Substitutions, which lists near every food allergy possible – from flour-types to five spice – with flavour-adjacent substitutions. There’s even vegetarian and vegan substitutions too, so you can cook sans meat without, say, sacrificing a smoky bacon flavour.

Let’s get more organised than an auditor with a vengeance. Paprika lets you save recipes from sites and modify them too, time each cooking step in-app while still reading the recipe, cross off ingredients as you go along and keep any notes for next time. 

You can plan your shopping list too, ingredient by ingredient, track out a monthly meal plan and check when its time to stock up on pasta or throw out your milk. This one’s makes multi-tasking so much simpler.

Do you know your beef brisket from your blade? Or lamb shank from loin? What about veal chuck from silver side? Consider this your Cuts 101 guide that covers not only what comes from where but how to use it, with a couple of recipes attached too. 

Sure, you’re the master of finding a just-ripe avo or bunch of bananas, but what about asparagus? Parsley? Cherries? Lettuce? Harvest is a guide to picking the highest-quality out; what to look for and what to avoid. There’s guide on pesticide levels too, if that interests you.

Noodler advertises itself as “The Noodle Soup Oracle”, which you didn’t even know you needed until now. This sleek app offers random noodle recipes and breaks down how to cook each ingredient and how to make the perfect broth. Slurp’s up, gang.

Consider your next meal hacked.