Android Apps For The Home Cook, Part I

In one of my previous posts about iPhone apps for home cooks, a reader commented and mentioned it would be nice to see a similar roundup of Android apps. I thought that was a great idea, so here is Round One of Android apps for the home cook!

• USDA Food Database - nutritional information for over 75,000 types of food.

• What To Cook - a helpful meal planner.

• Chinese Cooking Videos - a portable video guide to cooking many popular Chinese dishes.

• Meat Cooking Reference - a guide for cooking various meats (beef, lamb, pork, etc.) in different environments - stove, oven, grill.

• Cooking Conversions - Over 300 cooking conversions including volume, temperature, weight, oven and yeast conversions.

• Cook's Cheat Sheet - a cheat sheet for busy cooks.

(Image: Kathryn Hill)

Comments (13)

Bah. Android is supposed to be about Open Source, not paying for apps. So while it looks potentially useful, as a developer, I'm not about to pay for apps when I don't charge for the stuff I write.

Leave the payware to the iPhone crowd. They love to spend money.

Whups. That was in reference to the Cooking Conversions application.

This post is much appreciated!! Even if I do agree with jcwren's comment on not wanting paid apps, leave those to those iPhone fans who have money to burn. :P

Android IS open source, and that is why it will always rule over iPhone. If some devs want to give away apps for free, thats great... As a consumer, I do not have any problem paying for a good quality app. If I put the time and effort some of the android devs put in, I would expect the same. Anyway, if you REALLY wanted to get said apps for free you can through the magical wonders of Google Search.

Thanks for this! I hope epicurious comes up with an Android app soon.

Another Android app you may want to feature is Seasonal Harvest. It's very similar to the Locavore app on the iPhone that you featured earlier.

There's even a free (ad supported) version.

Android also has a BigOven App that is free.

Thanks for posting this. I don't mind paying for an android app, I don't think android is "supposed to be about..." anything.

I like the "cooking capsules" taster program (free) and the Cooking Capsules Brunch will be my next paid download.

I don't see any problem with paying for an android app if it's good and useful. Why shouldn't developers that work hard get paid for their work/creativity.

The point of android is that the OS is open source, not the individual applications.

That said, I also like Calorie Counter. It makes up looking calorie information real simple.

The USDA database of nutritional info is only 7,500 items, not 75,000. But if you're cooking from scratch, that's all you need, for the most part.

Re: Cooking Conversions-ok, so they want to charge for the app (I only like the free ones also). At least offer a free demo version so I know what I'm getting into. I don't have disposable income to do trials on apps. The developers should have allowed for some sort of back-up that can be saved on a Mac or PC. I had to do a master restart recently on my phone and all of the apps I had I needed to download again. Since the Android Market keeps a log of which apps you download, it wasn't too bad. I just lost all of the information that was saved in the apps themselves.

But, as far as cooking goes, this is a start.

Evernote's the only "cooking" app I use and need on my Droid. I can clip and save recipes I find online, save those to my Evernote, in a public folder, and use tags to edit recipes. Unlike Delicious, Evernote does a full-text index of my saved recipes, allowing me to search by ingredient, chef, or even my personal notes while shopping.

I recently migrated over 700 bookmarked recipes from my Delicious account to my free Evernote account. Best portable cooking app ever.

HELP! i've recently read about an app which features a recipe index for the most popular cookbooks. e.g. you're looking for a certain recipe in a jamie oliver book and you don't know in which, you can just look it up. forgot to bookmark, now i can't find it! am desperate - this is the very app i'd need! anyone can help???