Many of you probably didn’t know that I am a huge fan of cooking. I love the kitchen and everything that comes from it — except for the bags of garbage; those are gross. Over time, I have used a website called All Recipes to find new dishes to cook.
This has been a great resource, but what tends to happen is that I will make something with the website open and then close the window once I am done cooking. That means the next time I want to cook that dish (if it was good) I have to go back and try and find it. Sometimes I can’t find a recipe and it makes me sad. Last weekend, I decided I should do something about managing my favorite recipes better than I do right now.
This led me to the App Store since I knew I wanted to have a digital copy of my recipes. To my surprise, there were no free apps for recipe management, so I made sure to heavily research any app I was considering buying. I came to the conclusion that Paprika Recipe Manager was the best choice for me. It wasn’t cheap at $19.99; in fact it is tied for first place with Pages for the most expensive app I have purchased for my Mac. Trust me though, I think it is worth every penny.
Paprika Recipe Manager is what I like to call a zen-like app. It has the perfect balance of strong functionality under the hood with a simple user-interface making it very easy to use. What is great about this app is that it has some great additional features beyond just storing your recipes. You can add custom categories like tags to recipes. This makes organizing and finding recipes super easy once you get a lot of them.
You can also create a grocery list from your recipes. I read in earlier comments that a previous version didn’t have the ability to sort by aisle, but this one does. To me that is a great sign that the developers of this app are listening to the community — a HUGE plus in my book. Paprika also lets you add recipes to a calendar to create a schedule of meals for the week. Of course, this integrates with the grocery list function too, so you can easily create your weekly grocery list in just a few clicks.
One final feature worth noting is the built-in browser. I mentioned before that I find most of my recipes from All Recipes. Paprika will create a recipe card from the recipes on that site and others, though I haven’t tried to.
Paprika is a great app not just for your Mac but for your iOS device, too.
From all of the features I have already mentioned this is by far my favorite. Here is an example: I’m at home browsing the All Recipes website from within Paprika for my Mac and I find a recipe that I want to try. I add it to the manager then it is synced automatically to my iPhone via a free cloud-based service. Now I can get up and go to the grocery store with my list of ingredients in hand — so simple. However, once again the iOS version of Paprika Recipe Manager is not free. This one is $4.99 and I will say that seems like a lot for an iOS app in my opinion, but I had to have it. The two apps work so seamlessly that I don’t mind paying that much for an iOS app — it’s worth it.
All my years working in retail has made me into a frugal guy. I don’t like paying for things that I know shouldn’t cost that much. When it comes to these apps and having created my own iOS apps before I can honestly say that it is worth the $24.98 you will be spending on them. Paprika is just so feature-rich with a very easy to use interface that I don’t know why I didn’t buy them sooner.
If you’re a fan of cooking like I am, I suggest trying out the Mac version of Paprika Recipe Manager. If you’re a fan of all things tech, I suggest getting the iOS version of Paprika Recipe Manager to accompany the Mac app. Paprika will surely enhance your cooking experience just like any cookbook can, except this one will never run out of blank pages and you can back it up.
I fully endorse the folks that created Paprika, and you can view their website at paprikaapp.com if you want to do your own research.
P.S. For those non-iOS users who might be reading our newsletters there is an Android version of the mobile app out there too. Alas, I have an iPhone so I cannot speak to how well the Android version works, but seeing the quality and polish the team at Hindsight Labs has put into the Mac and iOS version I would expect it to be top-notch!