The winter holidays are almost upon us, and that means it’s time for people around the country to get cooking. While some people have particular recipes passed down from generations ago, I’ve found that it’s nice to mix a holiday meal up with something new every once in a while.
Yummly
is an app that gives people an easy way to find new recipes on their mobile devices. It’s a free app available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. When users first open it, the app serves up a feed of personalized recipes that are supposed to interest users.
The biggest draw to Yummly is the mouthwatering graphics. The app searches a variety of popular recipe sharing sites, including Allrecipes and Epicurious, and serves up each recipe entry in the form of a large image-based tile. Pro tip: don’t look at this app while you’re hungry. It’s easy to think that you can totally pull off some complicated mess of an egg dish at 4 p.m., and then realize three hours later that it’s both way too much food, and a complete waste of time.
Each recipe comes with a trio of tabs, the first of which is a list of ingredients that can be added to the app’s built-in shopping list. It’s a nice list that breaks out ingredients by category. If you’re planning an entire meal inside Yummly, I could see how having a unified shopping list makes sense, but I’d prefer to have an option of exporting all of that data to Evernote, which is where my other lists for the week live.
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People who are health conscious will get decent mileage out of Yummly’s built in calorie-counting feature, which includes a detailed nutritional breakdown of a recipe, along with the ability to add all of that information into Apple’s Health app on the iPhone.
If there’s one drawback to the app, it’s the third tab: instructions on how to make the dish. Yummly’s insistence on serving up the directions for the recipes inside a browser rather than extracting them from the sites themselves is jarring, and can often make recipes difficult to read.
I realize taking recipes and reformatting them would probably rub many publishers the wrong way (especially if the company doesn’t offer up any sort of compensation), but going from Yummly’s stylish experience to a completely different web view is not a great experience.
Still, Yummly is one of the best ways I’ve found to search a broad base of recipes on a mobile phone, and well worth a look for people who are in the mood to try out a new dish or two.
Yummly is available for free on the iOS App Store and Google Play Store.
