The top five most popular cooking apps downloaded during the coronavirus lockdown could come in handy to keep ourselves happy in these difficult times. Many people across haven’t left their homes for more than a month, and during this period of lockdown, several users have indulged in various hobbies including honing their cooking skills.
Because of reports of COVID-19 transmission due to food delivery, many of us have resorted to eating only home cooked meals. These days, social media is filled with videos and stories of people trying their hand at baking and making desserts. The locked down generation is now trying to create new fine-dine dishes they only ordered from restaurants before, including the immensely viral dalgona coffee that became an Internet sensation last month.
As more and more people experiment with cooking, we looked the five most popular free cooking apps that have been downloaded in India during the lockdown. We looked at the most popular downloaded apps on both iOS and Android to make a shortlist of ten apps, and then picked our five favourites after trying them all out.
Top Cooking Apps in India
This popular recipe app has been developed by BuzzFeed and it features over 4,000 recipes. Tasty comes with tools like Advanced Search, Step-By-Step instruction mode, a ‘My Recipes’ page, and a useful ‘Phone Awake’ feature that prevents it from going black while you cook. It lets you filter based on food preference (vegetarian or non-vegetarian), and suggests recipes based on dietary needs, social plans, cuisine, and even speed.
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The app is very easy to understand and navigate, and there is a nifty tips section that offers guidelines from users who have already made the recipe. The recipes are laden with photos for better understanding, but it could make you hungry if you browse for too long. There aren’t many Indian recipes you’ll find inside this app, but isn’t lockdown all about experimenting and getting out of your comfort zone?
2. Archana’s Kitchen iPhone | Android
If you’re firm on experimenting with Indian dishes only, the Archana Kitchen’s app should prove to be useful. It also lets you filter based on vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes, and is home to multiple Indian cuisines from across states. This includes Chettinad recipes, Kerala recipes, Konkan recipes, Maharashtrian recipes, Parsi recipes, Indo-Chinese recipes, Mughlai recipes, and more.
The app offers video guides, meal plan ideas, lunchbox ideas along with healthy eating, diet and fitness information. The recipes offer alternate healthier cooking techniques for those who prefer. There’s also a section for baby and toddler recipes that could prove to be useful for new moms. Even though the app has a huge amount of data, navigation and discovery of recipes is easy, thanks to the varied filter options and a multi-functional search feature. This app also lets you save recipes for later use in offline mode.
Yummly has a dataset of over 20 lakh recipes and it essentially collates recipes from popular food blogs like Allrecipes, Epicurious, Food52, Smitten Kitchen, and more, apart from offering its own set of recipes inside the app. This app also considers your allergies to nuts or sea food before offering recommendations, and has a range of cuisines like American, Chinese, Asian, Cuban, Greek, French, German, Italian, Indian, and even Thai.
It also offers recipes based on diets like ketogenic, lacto vegetarian, ovo vegetarian, pescetarian, vegan, paleo, and lacto-ovo vegetarian, and tries to hide recipes that include ingredients that you dislike. For instance, you can opt to dislike alcohol, and the app will hide all recipes that feature alcohol as an ingredient. There is also a feature called virtual pantry wherein you can add ingredients available in your kitchen, and Yummly will compute all the recipes you can make with them. This one could come in very handy when you’re out of recipe ideas or need to do some last minute emergency cooking.
4. Yum Recipes iPhone | Android
This is a video-focused cooking recipe app that puts heavy focus on Indian cuisine. It has been dissected into sections like Veggies 4 Life, Thirsty, Meat Lovers, Dessert Porn, Quick Bites, and Cooking 101.
While the video quality is good, the app design could have been a tad-bit better. The app supports voice search, and it should be your go to app if you rely more on videos when you cook. There are bunch of good recipes for kulfis, pickles, and laddoos that you may want to try.
5. Tarla Dalal Recipes iPhone | Android
Renowned chef and writer of multiple cook books, Tarla Dalal is a household name in the Indian cooking scene. For those unaware, she also has an app called Tarla Dalal Recipes that offers a range of delectable recipes curated by Dalal herself. The app offers a range of Indian recipes – from a variety of paranthas, South Indian recipes, kachoris, kadhis, vada pav, street chaat, raitas, to homemade ice creams and bread.
Because of her years of expertise in the cooking field, the dataset can be a reliable source for a good meal. She also offers recipes for Cancer, Aids, Arthritis, Diabetic, Fatty Liver, and Gout patients. Her health section is filled with tonnes of recipes that Vitamin A, B, C rich, and are healthy for the heart.
How are we staying sane during this Coronavirus lockdown? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.
