Crouton: Recipe Manager 4+

I have used Paprika for years but am now in the process of transferring everything over to Crouton. It’s similarly attractive and many features are similar (eg importing from websites, scaling, metric/imperial conversion, search, folders, meal plan, grocery list) but Crouton has some great additional features that I find really helpful, especially when it comes to 1) cooking (shows one step at a time; can tap an ingredient to display the quantity) and 2) meal planning (eg. main recipe list shows no of servings and prep/cook time in addition to recipe name and photo; ‘random recipe’ feature). I also LOVE the Discover tab which lets you subscribe to recipe feeds and quickly import any that you like the look of.
One other feature that I’d love would be some indicator of how long it’s been since I cooked a particular recipe, to make sure I’m not making the same few things over and over.

I use crouton purely to organise and display my recipes, and it does an incredible job. It can import a recipe from a website, break it into digestible steps, scale and convert the measurements to suit any number of people AND then generate a shopping list. And it does it all without feeling over complicated or difficult to use.

To top it all off, last night I discovered it has FACE CONTROL. When viewing your receipt in the step-by-step format, just wink with one to go back a step and wink with the other to go forward a step. No more touching your tablet with greasy, wet hands that may or may not have just touched raw meat. Genius!

I recommend this to anyone who uses a tablet to store and follow along with their recipes. One of the few apps I own that I actually enjoy and look forward to using.

I’ve tried numerous recipe manager apps over time but they all fail in some way — it’s time consuming to put a recipe in, or it doesn’t manage scaling well or whatever. Crouton, on the other hand has just thought of everything, and the fact that it uses AI to extract recipes from any format you could imagine (photo, pasted text, webpage, RSS feed from web pages you subscribe to…) is just such a joy. The meal planner is a logical feature to help you plan the week ahead using recipes in your library, and then it helps you build a shopping list.

Given it’s such a clever app the only thing I’d love it to be able to do is build a meal plan out for me based on some instructions, i.e. “build a meal plan for the week for someone who is currently eating a keto diet and is dairy free.”