Top 10 Recipe Apps for Working Moms

mom looking at recipes on phone

After rushing from office to home, it’s tough to whip up easy yet delicious dishes most nights. But with the help of some highly rated recipe apps at your fingertips, you can do it in a snap! From recipe organizer apps to those that give step-by-step instructions for quick meals, check out these 10 great recipe apps for Android, iOS, and Windows devices. They received top ratings for “The Best Recipe App” on reviews.com, Apple App Store and Google Play.


Gourmet Taste – Budget-Wise – Quick


If you’re in supermom mode and in the mood for a quick meal that tastes gourmet, there are some apps that can make the process stress-free, and many of them are free. Here’s a sampling:


1. Yummly (Android, iOS) Price: Free (4.5 stars on Apple App Store & GooglePlay)


This app displays a variety of recipes to “Yumm” (“like”). After you’ve selected five of them, along with any dietary restrictions, Yummly uses the data you entered to create a list of your favorites. You can look for recipes using filters such as “taste” and “cook time.” After you use this app for a while, it will recommend new recipes based on your tastes. It also builds instant shopping lists, with items that can be delivered through Instacart.


2. Allrecipes Dinner Spinner (Android & iOS); Price: Free; in-app purchases available (5.5 stars on Apple App Store & 4.5 stars Google Play)


With over 50,000 recipes, this newest version of DinnerSpinner has recipes that were rated by those who tried them. And this app’s users are a community of some 50 million! The Dinner Spinner app is chock full of photos, videos, and reviews. You can add your own recipes among those from selected professional chefs! Plus, you can even search for recipes that use ingredients available at your local grocery store if you allow the app to use your location.


woman chopping vegetables


Recipes from Celebrity Chefs


3. Food Network - In The Kitchen (Android & iOS) Price: Free (4+stars-App Store; 4.5 stars on Google Play)


As one of the “top recipe apps,” Food Network In the Kitchen features tens of thousands of recipes by celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay and Rachel Ray. New recipes are added every month, complete with photos and videos, so you can whip up your creations along with the pros! When you find a recipe you like, it’s easy to add it to the “catalog” so that you can find it easily. You can also search by ingredients, look for seasonal meals, and make personalized shopping lists. Plus, you can put your own notes and substitutions directly in the recipes.


For Hands-Free Cooking & More


4. Yes Chef – Hands-Free Recipe Assistant (iOS); Price: Free, in-app purchases available (rated 4+ in Apple App)


This is the first “iOS voice-controlled natural language cooking app,” making this type of technology useful in a spot where you spend a lot of time—your kitchen! The app has more than 350,000 recipes from its users and various food publications. Yes Chef Hands-Free Recipe Assistant reads the instructions to you out loud! It also lets you to tell it when you’re ready to move onto the next ingredient or step in the recipe! (The app is especially popular among those with vision or hearing impairments.) Its inventor says the “app has the potential to change the way blind people cook in the kitchen and frankly, [for] anyone who doesn’t want the hassle of washing and drying their hands, unlocking their phone, and scrolling to the correct step.”


5. Epicurious (iOS & Android) Price: Free (rated 4.3 to 4.8 stars)


The award-winning website and magazine well-known for its professional culinary stories also released this popular recipe app by the same name. Its nearly 30,000 recipes from a variety of cooking publications like Gourmet and Bon Appétit are tested by professional chefs. View them by skill level, ingredients, and more. The app can also put your faves in a digital recipe “box” and ingredients of your chosen recipe into a grocery shopping list! It also has a smart timer (that comes with Apple Watch support) and a seasonal ingredient finder—plus a hands-free cooking option!


Organize Your Recipes


6. BigOven Pro (iOS & Android) Price: Free or Paid—$2.49/month to remove ads / plus other features (4.5 stars in App Store & Google Play)


This is a great app for pulling your recipes altogether in one place. Not only does it have more than 250,000 recipes (that you can filter by ingredient, course, or collection), but it also includes great ways to manage your recipes. For example, it has a “leftovers” feature that allows you to plug in as many as 10 ingredients. The app will suggest recipes for you to try and include a menu planning calendar. It also features a shopping list to help you get organized. Its “Recipe Scan” feature lets you upload pictures of recipes you wrote and then you can have BigOven Pro transcribe them (3 pages free or up to 25 pages for paid subscribers).


7. Cheftap Pro (Android) Price: Free (4.3 stars-Amazon.com; 4.5 in Google Play)


This app gives you recipes from a bunch of your favorite sites all over the internet, with a plethora of tools to help you organize the collection. How does it do it? It has a built-in “web recipe scraper” that lets you import recipes from various websites and blogs. It can also take them from a Pinterest Board and from your Epicurious recipe box! You can tag and edit recipes—then store up to 50 offline. A ChefTap Pro account includes “premium features” like cloud backup and syncing with its unlimited recipe importing capability.


8. Paprika (iOs & Android) Price: $4.99 (rated 5 out of 5 stars-App Store, 4.5 Google Play & Amazon.com)


This is another great recipe manager. Using Paprika, you can organize recipes, plan meals, and create shopping lists. With its built-in browser, Paprika allows you to save recipes from the web. And if you want to see your recipes on your iPhone or tablet, you can use Paprika’s cloud sync service (free). This lets you sync your data across all your mobile devices.


leftovers in refrigerator


Recipes for Leftovers


9. Love Your Leftovers (iOs & Android) Price: Free (4 stars- Google Play; 4+ stars on Apple App Store.)


n exciting recipe app by developer Holroyd City Council, Love Your Leftovers helps you minimize waste without sacrificing taste! Every day, you likely have some food that went bad and you threw out... This kind of behavior may be hurting your budget. The Love Your Leftovers (LYL) app has solutions for creative ways to use food you have on hand. It gives you the tools to map out and shop for ingredients in an efficient way that helps you avoid wasting money and food at the get-go. LYL has many simple recipes for leftovers with features from meal planning to shopping lists. It also includes easy-to-follow instructions on how to store fresh food and leftover ingredients to keep them fresh longer.


10. CookBrite (Android; iOs coming soon) Price: Free (4 stars-Google Play)


This app offers “Mealtime Magic™ for busy people.” It helps you plan dinners for the week based on what you have in your pantry. Or, if you’re mostly out of food and need to make a quick trip to the store, it guides you with what to get for the night’s dinner and helps you save money to boot! You simply fill in what ingredients you already have and CookBrite can pick some recipes for that night!