10 Fantastic Cooking & Baking Apps for Thanksgiving

For many of us, Thanksgiving is all about food. Making food for your loved ones is always a surefire way to make them happy. Meeting your boyfriend’s parents for the first time? Impress them with a freshly baked pie and you might score extra points with the future in-laws. If you’re an inexperienced cook, that shouldn’t stop you from getting your Martha Stewart on; nowadays, there are plenty of how-to guides that will take you step-by-step through baking a Thanksgiving turkey or holiday ham, with helpful illustrations and even video.

Yes, cookbooks are great. Interactive cookbooks, however, are even better. Photos of food seem to jump right off the Apple iPad 2’s 1024-by-768-pixel screen, making our mouths water and resulting in a Homer Simpson-esque puddle of drool.

While this is great for iPad (and iPhone) users, our one gripe about these apps is that they’re scarce outside the iOS realm. We found a few that are offered on Android, webOS, and even one for BlackBerry, but the majority serve the iPhone or iPad. The cooking/baking app craze is still in its early stages, though, so we anticipate seeing more for other platforms, especially with the introduction of the budget-friendly Kindle Fire tablet and Nook Tablet.

Though some of these apps may seem relatively expensive, they’ll certainly cost you less than any printed cookbook. Most are in the $2.99 to $4.99 range. Now, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and preheat those ovens because we’ve found ten awesome apps for cooking and baking that are sure to get those stomachs rumbling. Plus, some of these apps aren’t just for holiday cooking, so you can continue using them throughout the new year.

See the slideshow, 10 Apps for Holiday Cooking & Baking on PCMag.com.

1. Chow Thanksgiving Dinner Coach
Available On: iPhone (free)

On Thanksgiving, it’s almost expected that guests bring side dishes and desserts to accompany the main attraction: the turkey. If, instead, you’ve decided to undertake the whole meal yourself, the Chow Thanksgiving Dinner Coach will take you through each step of all the necessary Thanksgiving staples: apple and sage stuffing, mashed potatoes, roasted sweet potatoes, sautéed green beans, roasted turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and nice brandy-apple punch to top it all off.

The app is free and only contains the recipes for these nine dishes, but for first-time Thanksgiving hosts, simple is crucial. The Chow Thanksgiving Dinner Coach makes a shopping list of all the ingredients for each recipe and then takes you through what you need to do in advance, starting on Monday when you should put your frozen turkey in the fridge to defrost. The app even has a calculator to estimate the cooking time of your turkey based on its weight. The recipes are separated into steps, accompanied by simple illustrations. Free, easy-to-use, and very thorough, the Chow Thanksgiving Dinner Coach is a must for Thanksgiving dinner hosts.

2. Epicurious
Available On: iPhone (free), iPad (free), Android (free), B&N Nook Color ($4.99), Windows Phone (free)

Besides being a great resource as a website and claiming a spot on our list of Top 100 Classic Web Sites, Epicurious is also available in app form for iPhone, iPad, Android, B&N Nook Color, and Windows Phone. We tested Epicurious on the iPad and on an Android phone and were pleased with how clean it is considering the large database of recipes it contains, most of which come from Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines.

The app has a number of categories, including helpful holiday sections such as Turkey & Gravy, Thanksgiving Sides, Stuffing, Green Beans, Sweet Potatoes, Thanksgiving Taters, Pies & Tarts, Fall Desserts, and even a section of vegetarian holiday recipes. It also comes complete with a section for holiday cocktails. It’s a fairly no-frills app without any video, but it does have a vast amount of recipes, each of which you can post to Facebook, Twitter, or send via email. Each recipe also has a shopping list that lets the user add and cross off each ingredient. Visit Epicurious to find the free download link for your device.


3. Baking With Dorie

Available On: iPad (normally $12.99, but on sale for $7.99)

Baking With Dorie, made specifically for the iPad, features recipes from the James Beard-Award-winning recipe author Dorie Greenspan and incorporates gorgeous photos and extremely high-quality videos. Dorie will take you step-by-step through her recipes in professionally filmed, high-def videos.The app is only available in landscape mode, so don’t expect to prop up your iPad vertically.
We do have two small complaints, though. First, there are only 24 recipes, but that’s because each recipe is offered in four different views: the standard cookbook layout; “Step by Step,” which separates the recipe into different sections, each with its own video; “SpinView,” which features shorthand instructions and videos for each step that appear in a carousel on the left-hand side; and “CulinView,” a unique way to look at a recipe that turns it into a graphical timeline, similar to a flowchart. Second, at 1.79GB, it takes up a lot of space because all of the videos are stored locally, meaning Wi-Fi is not required to use the app. There’s no specific holiday section, but the good mixture of recipes-breakfast sweets, cookies, cakes, pies, and tarts-will make tummies happy during the holidays and year round.

See the slideshow, 10 Apps for Holiday Cooking & Baking on PCMag.com.


4. Cook’s Illustrated

Available On: iPhone (free)

Chris Kimball, founder and editor of Cook’s Illustrated and host of the PBS show “America’s Test Kitchen,” is the main man behind the Cook’s Illustrated iOS app. The app features 50 of Cook’s Illustrated’s “all-time best recipes,” plus recipe videos, a kitchen timer, and a shopping list. But the unique part of the Cook’s Illustrated app is its Supermarket Ingredient Reviews feature, which recommends which brands to buy and which ones to steer clear of. Thorough research and testing goes into these recipes and ingredients and the user can read up on them within the app. Unfortunately, getting the most out of the app, including the majority of the Supermarket Ingredient Reviews, requires an annual $34.95 membership.

5. How to Cook Everything
Available On: iPad ($9.99), iPhone ($4.99)

From famed food journalist Mark Bittman’s award-winning book of the same name, the comprehensive How To Cook Everything app shares 2,000 recipes and 400 how-to illustrations. Though there aren’t any videos demonstrating the techniques and recipes, there are plenty of helpful pictures, as well as a built-in timer, a search function, voiceovers by Bittman, and a grocery list. The user can search by key ingredients, style (comforting, spicy, creamy, sweet, Mediterranean, Southern, etc.), technique (bake, braise, deep fry, grill, etc.), and by type (fast, make ahead, vegetarian, or essential). Featured recipes change weekly and an expanded recipe layout lets the user take notes. There’s also an enhanced holiday menu with fun wintertime animations. The holiday menus cover the gamut: traditional and less traditional Thanksgiving dinners, Hanukkah, a tree-trimming party, Kwanzaa, a quick shopping night dinner, an appetizer buffet party, Christmas Eve dinner, and a New Year’s Eve “blowout” dinner.

6. iCookbook
Available On: Android ($4.99), iOS ($4.99), webOS ($4.99)

Save your iPad from messy baking hands by using iCookbook’s unique voice command feature. Once users have chosen a recipe, they can turn on voice command and say things like “next” and “back” to move through the recipe. As long as they’re standing within three feet of the iPad and there aren’t a bunch of kids running around yelling in the background, the app should be able to recognize the commands. Users can also set, play, pause, cancel, and close up to three timers, as well as skip to numbered steps using the voice commands.

With new entries added to the 2,000-recipe library each month, the iCookbook is a great resource for finding holiday recipes, especially thanks to its list of holidays and occasions. Additionally, each month of the year, the iCookbook app offers a free bundle of new, seasonal recipes available for download in the iCookbook store. The store, located in the lower right-hand corner, has sets of recipes to purchase, such as Thanksgiving, holiday party appetizers, holiday cookies, jarred edible gifts, and holiday recipes for diabetics. Each set has 25 or 35 recipes and costs $1.99 or $2.99, respectively.

7. Martha Stewart Makes Cookies
Available On: iPhone ($2.99), iPad ($4.99)

A name synonymous with cooking, Martha Stewart has landed in the app world with some fantastic iOS apps. In addition to her Everyday Food, Smoothies, and Cocktails apps, there’s also the Martha Stewart Makes Cookies app. On the iPad version, clean layouts and high-def photos make the cookies appear real enough to bite right out of the screen. The app comes with more than 90 recipes plus additional à la carte purchases within the app. For those that like to give home-baked treats for holiday presents, there’s a whole section on cookies perfect for boxing up. The app even has a section with packaging ideas, complete with templates that can be sent to the user’s email. Though the recipes themselves resemble those in the traditional cookbook format, there’s also a shopping list feature and instructional videos for basic baking techniques and select recipes.

Also of note: the Martha Stewart Cocktails app currently has a limited-time free holiday cocktails pack featuring “20 of Martha’s festive favorites, from eggnog to warming ciders and party-friendly sparklers and punches.” A free limited-time holiday bar snack pack is also available.

See the slideshow, 10 Apps for Holiday Cooking & Baking on PCMag.com.

8. Paprika
Available On: iPad ($4.99), iPhone ($4.99), Mac ($19.99)

The Internet is a never-ending web of recipes. For those of us who are constantly bookmarking recipes on various sites, that can make it rather frustrating to recall that apple crisp recipe you tagged back in September. Paprika helps solve that.

The app is more or less a blank slate right off the bat and the user can add favorite recipes, either manually, or via the built-in browser. The default home page is Google, so the user can search for recipes or enter a specific URL. Over a hundred of the larger recipe sites, such as All Recipes, Chow, Epicurious, and Food Network, work well with the app, and allow the user to simply click the “Save Recipe” button in the upper right-hand corner to download the recipe to Paprika. Once there, the user can save the recipe, categorize it, add ingredients to a grocery list, add notes, and edit it. If a site isn’t recognized by Paprika-say it’s a smaller food blog, for instance-the user can copy and paste the information right from Paprika’s built-in browser and then save it to their recipes.

For those cooks that have scribbled their own recipes on a piece of paper, they can enter the recipe manually and even add a photo of the dish. Paprika features free cloud sync to transfer the user’s recipes to all Apple devices. There’s also a screen-lock feature to prevent the screen from turning off while cooking.


9. SparkRecipes

Available On: iPhone (free), iPad (free), BlackBerry (free), and Android (free)

The holidays can be an extremely difficult time to maintain a healthy eating regimen. Fortunately, SparkRecipes, which caters to lower-calorie dishes, is full of guilt-free versions of the classics. Though it has fewer bells and whistles than some other apps, each recipe contains the nutrition facts and an option to open the recipe in a browser to view other users’ comments. Besides the usual browsing methods, SparkRecipes lets the user browse through recipes by occasion. The library is also searchable by dietary restrictions (vegetarian, vegan, lactose-free, gluten-free, low-fat, low-carb, sugar-free) and by cuisine.

10. The Photo Cookbook Quick & Easy and The Photo Cookbook – Baking
Available On: iPad ($4.99), Mac ($15.99)

Falling somewhere between an app and an e-cookbook, The Photo Cookbook Quick & Easy offers a plethora of recipes laid out with beautifully shot photos. If you don’t count the spinning carousel of recipes, there’s no interactive part of the app. There’s also no shopping list option and no way to browse by specific holiday categories. Still, the layout is clean, it’s easy to use, and users have the option to email the recipe.

The app’s recipes are displayed in a Brady Bunch-style grid and are separated into different categories: meat, fish, vegetarian, and desserts. Users have the option to buy various 60-recipe packages for $4.99, including Italian, Asian, and baking. There’s also a separate app, The Photo Cookbook – Baking with just the baking recipes. This app has the same layout as the Quick & Easy app and is categorized by cakes and traybakes, pastries, small cakes and cookies, and breads. Check out The Photo Cookbook for more info.

For more technology tips, advice and gift ideas, check out PCMag.com’s holiday gift guide.


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