The Good
- Thousands of recipes
- Free
- Includes content from Gourmet magazine
The Bad
- Recipes displayed in slideshow format
- Glitch in shopping list
If the shuttering of Gourmet magazine still has you down, Epicurious (Free) may be your new favorite recipe app. It includes nearly 30,000 recipes -- all free -- from Epicurious.com, which hosts recipes from Bon Appétit and Gourmet magazines.
Read More: Best Recipe Apps for the iPhone and iPad
Thousands of free recipes
Recipe apps tend to be expensive, with some of our favorite apps -- Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything -- costing US$7.99 and $4.99, respectively. The Epicurious Recipes app is free, which makes it a pretty good deal.
When you first launch the app, the homepage is optimized for the current season. I tested the Epicurious app in July, and the categories were all summer-themed: summer desserts, summer dinners, main-course salads, grilling entrees, etc. Under those individual categories you can scroll through popular recipes, many with pictures. You can add any recipe to your favorites, add the ingredients to your shopping list, or email it to a friend. That gives you one option for sharing recipes, but Twitter or Facebook integration would be nice too.
The search tab is very full-featured. You can search for recipes by main ingredient, meal/course, cuisine, dietary consideration (including vegan/vegetarian recipes), dish type, or occasion. A keyword search is also available.
Not without downsides
Unfortunately, the search results could be organized in a better way. Recipe results are displayed in a slideshow format, so you have to swipe through individual recipes to view your results. The recipes scroll quickly, but a list format would make it easier to view quickly or do things like sort by rating. When browsing recipes in the Epicurious recipes iPhone app, you’ll also run into frequent ads that take up the whole page. Annoying, yes, but this is a free app so you can’t blame them for running ads.
The shopping list is another nice feature, and you can view ingredients by individual recipe or combine them all into one consolidated list. However, I was disappointed to see that not all of the recipes I added actually made it into the shopping list tab. I couldn’t figure out why some recipes were added and others weren’t, but it seems that if I added a recipe to my favorites and then to my shopping list, it only showed up in the favorites area.
The Bottom Line
Even though I’m not a big fan of how the Epicurious recipes app displays recipes, I still think it’s a terrific deal. The app contains thousands of recipes and I especially love having a resource for Gourmet magazine recipes. However, the shopping list does have a weird glitch, so that leads to a slightly lower rating. It’s not perfect, but I still plan on keeping the Epicurious app on my iPhone. Overall rating: 3.5 stars out of 5.
What You’ll Need
The Epicurious app is compatible with the iPhone and iPod touch; the app is also available in an optimized iPad app. It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.