The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android Your Android's connected to the web, so it's also connected to the vast wealth of cooking knowledge, recipes, food price, and other culinary data. Here are the best apps for putting Android to work in the kitchen.

Note: For a look at the flip side of the mobile OS coin, check out the best cooking and recipe apps for iPhone.

As with previous entries in our best Android app series, we've included links to both the app's homepage, and to the AppBrain entry, where you can find QR codes and more detailed information on the app.

Recipe Finders and Organizers

Epicurious

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android No less than 28,000 recipes available through this elegant search interface. Most of them were pulled from the eponymous forum, one of Conde Nast's magazines (Bon Apetit or the since-passed Gourmet), and top chefs and food personalities. All of them are searchable by text or voice-to-text. The biggest boons to the cooking type, though, are the step-by-step kitchen mode, where your screen shows you only what you need for your next step in the recipe, and the grocery list generator. [AppBrain]

BigOven

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android What does BigOven have that other recipe apps don't? Namely, more than 170,000 recipes in its database. So if you're the type that likes to really nitpick your curried chicken salad recipe, you'll find a happy home inside the free Android app. The most helpful tool for picking through the recipes is the Leftover Wizard—enter in up to three ingredients you're trying to use up, and BigOven returns with recipes that take on all of them. [Homepage] [AppBrain]

WTFSIMFD

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android What's with the name? It's the question you might ask of yourself when recipe inspiration is lacking. "What," you might ask, "should I make for dinner"—only add an expletive in there, somewhere. For the snarky name, and funny responses, this app, like the webapp it comes from, pulls from a deep set of recipes, and switches between meat and vegetarian dishes with ease. Plus, there's something so cathartic about all the cursing, and pointedly clicking to say you want something else—always something else. [Homepage] [AppBrain]

Grocery List Organizers

Grocery IQ

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android Because its developed by Coupons.com, grocery list builder Grocery IQ does, indeed, show you coupons and shoppers club discounts for items you've got on your list. But it's the way you build your list with Grocery IQ that's really convenient. You can say or type in what you need, but if you've just emptied the last of the Frosted Mini-Wheats, you can scan the box barcode with the app, and it goes right on your list—a list you can easily share with other folks, too. It's also available for iOS, so dual-platform households need not duke it out. [Homepage] [AppBrain]

Our Groceries

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android Somehow, we'd never heard of this grocery list manger, despite its apparent popularity (at least 50,000 downloads) and rather full-featured nature. It's a live grocery list that multiple family members or roommates can edit from their Androids, BlackBerrys, iPhones, or web browsers, and as one shopper checks something off, it's pushed live to all the other lists. Folks like Kathleen and her husband dig it, and the Market reviews are full of a rare kind of good will. [Homepage] [AppBrain]

Google Shopper

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android $5.99 for Stash tea? $4 for oyster sauce? You must be able to get this stuff cheaper. If you've got your phone with you, you can verify your suspicions, and even order your good for cheaper right from your phone. Google's Shopper app can recognize labels and certain container or packages, bar codes, or straight-up text entry, then show you which stores have your foodstuffs for less, both locally and online. You also save a history of items as you use Shopper, so the next time you're at a store with remarkable deals, you can load up on what you passed by last time. [Homepage] [AppBrain]

Kitchen Utilities

Ratio

The Best Cooking and Recipe Apps for Android Recipes can only take you so far. When you want to cook food in the amounts you need, or make food exactly the way you'd like with the ingredients you have, you'll need to know the fundamental ratios that bind breads, vinaigrettes, sauces, and other culinary elements. Michael Ruhlman's Ratio app, based on his weight-based Ratio methodology, frees you up to improvise in the kitchen. Choose a food, enter in how much of each ingredient you have, and it tells you what else you need to hit the, well, you know. ($5 in Market) [Homepage] [AppBrain]

We put out the Twitter call, and brainstormed among ourselves, but we still feel like there are great apps for cooking, grocery shopping, and recipe finding available for Android that aren't listed here. If you know of one, tell us in the comments! We'll peek through and update the list with the best finds.