As you may have noticed, I’ve been starting to cook a bit more lately. In doing so, I found that I needed a good place on the web to both discover new recipes, and to save some of my own.
After a week of scouring the interwebs for good online recipe apps, I’ve come up with my top five favorite sites to solve the problem.
1. Foodily – I just found this one today and am impressed with the clean and simple user experience and social capabilities. Though they don’t necessarily do anything new or unusual with the social features (you can heart things, share, etc), they have a leg up on the others simply due to the fact that they hook into your Facebook account. The one thing Foodily is missing is a place on the site where users can add their own recipes. Perhaps coming soon?
2. Plan to Eat – This site is great for adding recipes (both on your own and from around the web) and then mapping out your weekly meals with those recipes. Once you add recipes to your calendar, the site will auto-detect the ingredients and fill out a shopping list for you. The two big bummers about this site are: a) it’s hardly social, and b) it costs money, an obvious deterrent for a lot of people. I’m personally a fan of paying for services that I think add enough value to my life, but I’m not sold on this one just yet.
3. Gojee – Yes, I’ve already blogged about this one. But, it still remains one of my favorites as it is both beautiful and useful for figuring out what you can make with the ingredients already in your kitchen. I just have to be sure to eat BEFORE I play around on this site – otherwise, the delicious food pictures look way too tempting!
4. KeepRecipes – This site has the standard keep/add recipe functionality, and goes one step beyond with a Twitter-like feature that lets you “follow” popular chefs and food publishers (though there are only about a dozen so far). While there is a lot of interesting food content on the site, I wasn’t too impressed with the simplicity of the user experience. Like many of the others, they also aren’t using any sort of social integration for easy sharing among friends. Finally, the site was a bit slow for me, another hit on the user experience.
5. Pinterest– Even though it’s not necessarily a food/recipe site, many people told me that they used Pinterest to track things they wanted to cook. Social? Yes. Pretty? Yes. But, because it’s not a recipe site to start with, it doesn’t have structured fields to add your own recipes or to easily follow recipe directions. Gimme Bar could be a better solution, but as I said earlier today, I still haven’t formed a final opinion just yet.
So who is the winner? For me, Foodily seems most interesting. Now, someone just needs to convince them to add a personal recipe feature to the site and they’ll win my heart forever.
