Paprika: A tasty iOS app for managing recipes

Paprika is a recipe manager and shopping assistant for iOS with a tasty design and a system guaranteed to make forgotten ingredients a thing of the past.

Hastily scribbled grocery lists and smudged recipe cards have probably killed more great meals that any two bad cooks combined. Using Paprika [App Store $4.99] during the preparation and creation of a meal sold me on the way it helps you prevent this kind of thing for good.

After breezing through Paprika briefly on purchasing it I decided that testing it in the line of fire would probably be the best test of its usability while in action. That night’s dinner was to be crunchy pepper-and-parm-crusted halibut with cherry tomato-basil Sauce and a pasta with a white butter sauce with cream buerre nantais.

Both of these recipes were found on the web by my wife while browsing Rachael Ray and Epicurious.com. To import the recipes into Paprika, you simply pop open the browser in the app, browse to the recipe and wait for the app to detect that it’s looking at a recipe. When it does the Save Recipe button will light up in the corner, allowing the app to download the recipe for you.

The app will then break the recipe down into a photo, name, ingredients and directions for you and tuck them away in the Recipes section.

You can then view the recipes to make sure that they downloaded correctly and to check the details. Once you’re ready to start gathering ingredients, simply tap on the shopping cart to add all of the required elements to your shopping cart. It works brilliantly, separating them out by item and recipe.

You can also add recipes manually by typing them in and it will do the same. This is currently the only way to get recipes into Paprika other than the web or email import.

As you’re doing your shopping, simply tap on the items as you move through the market gathering them. I’d like to see the ability to separate them by categories like meat, fish, vegetable, spice etc here but currently you can only sort by all, purchased or unpurchased items.

Once our shopping trip was complete we came home and began to prep, the iPad set up beside the prep area for quick reference to the instructions. We have kitchen timers available but if you don’t Paprika provides one for you that you can set down to the minute, but not the second.

In a very nice touch you can scale the ingredients by serving which will alter the ingredients automatically for you but this feature still seems shaky as it didn’t detect all of the items and the changes weren’t reflected in the grocery list.

As my wife cooked the meal and I made myself an irritant by shooting pictures of the proceedings. She was able to refer back to the recipe at a glance and add some notes to the instructions as she went. I asked her opinion of Paprika and she said that it was a big help in making the ingredient gathering simple and it was an easy reference guide during the process.

As my wife cooked the meal and I made myself an irritant by shooting pictures of the process she was able to refer back to the recipe at a glance and add some notes to the instructions as she went. I asked her opinion of Paprika and she said that it was a big help in making the ingredient gathering simple and it was an easy reference guide during the process.

I’m very impressed by Paprika as a recipe collection and shopping utility. I haven’t even touched some of the more advanced features like planning meals, categorizing recipes into folders or marking your favorite dishes and it’s already a favorite.

If you’re an amateur foodie or an accomplished chef that finds new recipes on the web constantly then you should give Paprika a try. If you already have an extensive library of written recipes that you’d like to import into Paprika I can tell you that you might want to hold off until they have a better way to import those.

Oh and the meal was fantastic!