How a smartphone can help you cook
As a beginner, we provide an app that gives you recipe ideas. Mela, the great recipe management app, is the main course. And we have a little dessert ready.
With the right app, the smartphone can act as a kitchen aid.
Photo: Getty Images
Recipes and cookbooks have one thing in common: there is an abundance of both—and only a few suit our personal tastes.
“What should I cook?” A quick answer to the question
Today there are apps that give us quick answers to the frequent question of what to cook. The app is from Chef (Android And iPhone) allows every amateur cook to submit their favorite recipes. While the selection is large, the quality is inconsistent – especially the photos accompanying the recipes, which often elicit less interest than inspiration for a zero diet.
Kitchen Stories is a digital cooking magazine.
Photo: Screenshot
When it comes to stimulating appetite, it is Kitchen stories (iPhone And Android) Proven Value: This is a type of user-engaged feed, but focuses on editors’ contributions.
Your favorite recipes on your smartphone
There is also an app for our favorite recipes. This means Mela (iPhone), it costs five francs and is one of those kitchen aids that will immediately take your heart: it deserves the highest “Gault Millau” points because it is built with such attention to detail.
With Mela, it’s easy to digitize recipes from books. The app captures them with the camera: it automatically recognizes book pages and photos. To help, mark the blocks of text that contain the critical information. The app performs text recognition and breaks down the information into shopping lists and recipes.
The Mela app transfers your favorite recipes from cookbooks to your smartphone.
Photo: Matthias Schuessler
According to our tests, this works well, but it’s not perfect: manual editing is occasionally necessary, but these are tolerable when you realize how much effort is required if you have to type the recipe. You can also add the source and cooking time for each recipe registered this way. And you have to enter how many mouths the recipe is intended for: the application recognizes the amount and weight in the recipe, so you can use the slider to adjust the number of people for any number of people.
In addition to being able to capture recipes with the camera, you can also import them from the Internet. To do this, tap on the “Browse” button and then go to the desired website. Once there, the app will display a “recipe found” label that you can tap to import.
The application records ingredients and recipes from the camera – the information is automatically classified by marking blocks of text.
Photo: Matthias Schuessler
You can mark your recipes as favourites, manage them using your own categories and enter them into a calendar. Plan how and when you want to cook. And there’s a shopping list that pulls ingredients from all the planned recipes so you can shop at once.
When it’s time to prepare, tap “Cooking”: the application will show the instructions step by step and you only have to tap the display to switch to the next instruction. And if the recipe says a time like “25 minutes au gratin” then tap on it and the timer will start.
Unfortunately, the Mela app is not available for Android. There are options. Paprika recipe manager Or cooking on
Prepare what the refrigerator and pantry have to offer
Not everyone manages their family in such a systematic way, and not everyone plans their meals a week in advance. The app Excellent cooking (iPhone And Android) is an aid to those who want to prepare what their refrigerator and pantry can carry. You have to put all the groceries in this app first: everything except water, salt and pepper, of course, according to the instructions, “even the old Worcestershire sauce in the back corner of the fridge.”
In Supercook, you put all the ingredients in the fridge, freezer and pantry.
Photo: Screenshot
The application provides all the recipes that can be found with these shares. The list can be filtered by main ingredient and type of meal (eg breakfast or main course) and sorted by number of ingredients, nutrition or level. This will not only improve them but also prevent food waste.
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