Recipe Keeper

Review by eFreeware

Recipes tend to scatter. Some live in a browser bookmark, some in a photo of a cookbook page, some on a card in a drawer, and a few exist only in your head. When you want one of them on a Tuesday evening, you end up scrolling through screenshots or giving up and ordering in. Recipe Keeper is built to pull those loose ends into one place.

It comes from Tudorspan Limited and has been on Google Play since November 2014, with more than a million installs and a 4.7 average from over 20,000 ratings. It is free to download, carries no ads, and offers in-app purchases. The pitch is straightforward: collect, organize and share recipes, then use them through a meal planner and a shopping list that follow you between devices.

Getting recipes in without retyping them

The part I would care about most is how little typing it asks for. You can enter a recipe by hand with as much or as little detail as you like, or paste one in from a document or another app. From there you sort things by course and category, attach photos, rate them and mark favorites. That is ordinary housekeeping, but it is the difference between a collection you maintain and one you abandon after a fortnight.

More interesting is the importing. The app searches the web for recipes and pulls them in from hundreds of supported sites, and you can adjust what arrives to match how you actually cook. For anything that only exists physically, the camera scans cookbook pages, magazine clippings, handwritten cards, existing photos and PDF files, and OCR turns those images into editable text. Family recipes that live on a stained index card are exactly the sort of thing this is meant to rescue.

The app suits people who want one place for their recipes, with importing from a long list of other programs, including Paprika Recipe Manager, BigOven, Pepperplate, MasterCook and Cook'n. That matters if you have years of accumulated entries and no appetite for starting over.

Finding a recipe when you are already hungry

A collection is only useful if you can get at it. Recipe Keeper searches by name, ingredient or directions, and you can browse by course, category and rating instead. The ingredient search is the one I would lean on: if there is half a cabbage and some chorizo in the fridge, you can look for something that uses them rather than shopping for a recipe you picked at random.

Nutrition information can be stored alongside a recipe, and you can search by nutritional amounts, which helps if you are cooking toward a target rather than a craving. Related recipes can be linked to one another, and you can attach links to online videos. Small conveniences, but they keep you inside the app instead of bouncing out to a search engine mid-cook.

While you are actually cooking, ingredients can be checked off as they go in and the current step highlighted, so you are not hunting for your place with wet hands. The screen lock stays off while a recipe is open, and text size is adjustable, which is a thoughtful touch for reading from across the kitchen.

Planning the week and shopping for it

The meal planner covers a week or a month, and you can push everything you have planned onto the shopping list in one step. If you would rather not decide, the app can generate a random plan from hints you give it. That is a reasonable answer to the standing question of what to cook tonight, and it works best for people who plan in blocks rather than one day at a time.

The shopping list groups items by aisle, which is the feature that saves the most time in practice, and it is built to keep you from buying duplicates you already have at home. Serving sizes can be scaled up or down, with ingredient amounts recalculated automatically, so cooking for eight instead of four does not turn into mental arithmetic at the counter.

You can also turn a set of recipes into a cookbook for printing or as a PDF, with a cover page, table of contents and layout options. That is a nice way to hand a family collection to someone, or to put together something more considered than a folder of screenshots.

Sharing and syncing between your devices

Recipes can be sent by email or to social networks, and you can set up a shared family collection. Adding a recipe from another Recipe Keeper user takes a single tap, which is the sort of thing that makes a household collection practical rather than theoretical.

Syncing covers Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac and Windows, so the same recipes, shopping list and meal planner travel with you. Worth flagging: the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Windows versions are separate purchases. If your household mixes phone platforms, that is a cost to plan for rather than a detail to discover later.

There is also an Amazon Alexa skill, English only, that searches your recipes, reads step-by-step instructions hands-free and adds items to your shopping list. It is a bonus rather than a reason to install, but it fits neatly with the screen-lock and large-text touches for anyone who cooks with their hands full.

What you need before you start

Setup is mostly about deciding how much you want to put in. You can start by adding a handful of recipes by hand, or import a batch from websites and scanned pages and tidy them afterward. The app supports 25 color schemes, light and dark modes, and 15 languages, and recipes work offline, so a collection remains readable without a connection.

The scanning route depends on your phone's camera or on photos and PDFs you already have, and the OCR step is what converts those images into text you can edit. Importing from the web relies on the supported sites, and the app can import recipe gallery files. Bulk editing is available when you want to fix a batch of entries at once, which is the realistic way to clean up a large import.

One requirement worth knowing in advance: the Alexa features work in English only.

Who gets the most from this

Recipe Keeper fits people who cook from their own collection rather than following whatever a search engine serves up that evening. If you have recipes spread across bookmarks, screenshots, PDFs and handwritten cards, the combination of web import, camera scanning and OCR is aimed directly at that mess. It also suits anyone who plans meals a week at a time and wants the shopping list to fall out of the plan.

Households that cook together are another good fit, thanks to the shared collection and one-tap recipe sharing. And if you have already invested years in another recipe program, the transfer tools mean you do not have to choose between keeping that history and moving to something that syncs across your phone, tablet and desktop.

Someone who only ever cooks the same five dishes from memory will find little here to justify the setup. The value comes from having enough recipes that finding the right one is a genuine problem.

A keeper for cooks with a backlog

Recipe Keeper does the unglamorous work well: it gets recipes in from almost anywhere, keeps them searchable, and connects them to a planner and a shopping list that sync across devices. The scanning and OCR route for paper recipes is the standout, and the aisle-grouped shopping list is the feature most likely to change how a week actually goes. It is free, ad-free, and the in-app purchases are there if you want them.

The caveats are practical rather than serious. Syncing to Apple and Windows devices costs extra, the Alexa skill is English only, and the app rewards a bit of upfront effort to import and tidy your collection. None of that undermines what it does.

If you have a drawer of recipe cards, a folder of screenshots and a vague sense that dinner could be more interesting, this is worth installing. If your cooking is already organized, you probably do not need it.

What's new in version 3.46.1.0

Added Recipe Gallery file importer Recipe import updated to support more web sites.