The Good
- Tons of recipes
- Advanced search options
- Nutrition facts included
The Bad
- No pictures
- Ingredients and instructions on separate pages
If you like a lot of variety in your recipe apps, Healthy Recipes by SparkRecipes (Free) may be right up your alley. This extensive app includes nearly 200,000 user-submitted recipes, but does SparkRecipes set itself apart in this competitive category?
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Thousands of individual recipes
SparkRecipes.com is a recipe website from the makers of SparkPeople.com, one of the biggest online diet communities on the web. Like the AllRecipes.com Dinner Spinner and BigOven apps, all the recipes are submitted by users. This allows for a ton of variety, but also some variation in the quality of recipes as well.
Upon opening the SparkRecipes app, you’re confronted with a number of search options. You can search recipes by keyword or browse by category; there’s also an advanced search that limits your results by calories, time, or dietary preferences. Like the Whole Food Recipes and VegWeb apps, SparkRecipes is a good choice for vegetarians since you can search only for vegetarian or vegan recipes. It’s also easy to find gluten-free, low-fat, or low-carb recipes.
I quickly realized that keyword searching is the way to go -- browsing by category brings up way too many results. The list view shows calories per serving and a user rating, but there are no thumbnail pictures, making it pretty boring to scroll through the results. Keyword searching is a better bet, but you really have to make it specific to narrow down the results. It would be great if the results list could be sorted by rating to find the most popular recipes.
A recipe-app pet peeve
Within the individual recipes in the SparkRecipes app, you can save to your favorites, share by email or view the recipe online. Unfortunately, SparkRecipes also includes one of my recipe-app pet peeves -- the ingredient amounts and directions are listed on separate pages. It’s not uncommon among recipe apps, but it forces you to switch between the two pages when you’re preparing a recipe. On a positive note, the SparkRecipes app is good for dieters since it includes nutrition facts for each recipe.
The SparkRecipes app includes ads, but they’re pretty unobtrusive and are mainly just advertising the SparkPeople calorie-counting app. In addition to thousands of recipes, there are also a number of videos featuring a professional chef who walks you step-by-step through the recipe. They load quickly, and the video quality is fine over a WiFi connection. The videos are pretty fuzzy if you use a 3G connection, but you can still get the gist of what’s going on.
The Bottom Line
The SparkRecipes app certainly contains thousands of recipes, but it’s not quite up to the same level of the very best recipe apps. Apps like How to Cook Everything or Epicurious provide a good balance between quantity and quality; right now, it seems that the SparkRecipes app leans heavily towards quantity. If you have a specific recipe in mind and need to find it fast, SparkRecipes can be a good choice. If you want to browse, however, there are better options out there. Overall rating: 3 stars out of 5.
What You’ll Need
The SparkRecipes Healthy Recipes app is compatible with the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.