Cheftap

Recipes are a long standing tradition, both in families and restaurants. They are often handed down through generations and finely crafted to the height of flavor. If you’ve been entrusted with family recipes, then odds are you have a slew of recipes hand written on index cards or jotted down on well-faded paper and worn with age. Whether they be tucked away in a drawer or filed in a recipe box, wouldn’t it be nice to have them all stored in one location in clearly visible text and step by step instructions? Cheftap is the answer.

Adding Recipes

Cheftap is like having a full color recipe card for every dish on the menu. Recipes are entered into the app a variety of ways. Those who have recipes stored across the web will find that importing those recipes is an absolute cinch. Cheftap scans bookmarks from all browsers installed on your device and automatically adds any recipes it finds. Along with bookmark scanning, Cheftap has the ability to import your recipe box from popular recipe sites AllRecipes.com and Epicurious. Importing recipes is not limited to a select few websites either. Cheftap can import recipes from any website or blog. By using microdata (similar to Google’s), as well as their own proprietary algorithm, Cheftap is able to decipher the ingredients, steps, images and special instructions for each recipe. As if importing from anywhere on the web wasn’t enough, Cheftap has the options to manually enter in recipes or copy and paste a URL into the app.

Accuracy

Importing is important, but let’s face it if the recipes aren’t easy to read or continually wrong, then it’s hardly worth it. No need to worry with Cheftap. We found the app to be extremely accurate, even when faced with a recipe from a non-recipe website with no distinctive separation between ingredients, directions and multiple recipe options for a single dish. When an image is available, Cheftap imports it and scales it appropriately to fit the image box size.

Interface

Another great part to the Cheftap app is its interface. The interface is not flashy, which is exactly what you want in an app where reading and text display is prevalent. When a recipe is selected, a short synopsis of the recipe is displayed with the recipe image, name, serving size, prep time and cook time. Viewing the recipe yields the full instructions for the dish. Ingredients are displayed above the instructions and each has a distinct background color to visually assist the preparer. Recipes are viewable in two ways. In recipe format all recipe information is displayed on a single page, while the step-by-step format details the instructions part only in a multi-page display.

Other Features

Cheftap does not come preloaded with categories, but provides the option to add them manually. Recipes can be added or removed at any time from categories and the process is a simple press-to-add method. During the process, an activity tab is displayed near the top showing active dishes being prepared. Cheftap provides several ways for searching recipes within the app, such as recently viewed, alphabetically, favorites and others. With all the available options and features it would be nice to have a some tutorials or information for using the app. Cheftap once again succeeds by supplying tours, instructions and video tutorials for using the app.

Two features in particular we are happy to see incorporated, from a strictly app perspective, are feedback and backup/restore options. Cheftap is a relatively new app and although the app is significantly developed, the developers are actively listening to user feedback to improve Cheftap. Backup and restore of recipes is a feature that almost had to be included with an app of this nature and Cheftap comes through again. Backups are saved to the SD card in your phone automatically and can be backed up to your PC when connected. Restoration involves nothing more than tapping the restore button.

Final Thoughts

It’s typical to be hesitant of apps that store coveted information. In this case, recipes which by all accounts can be a tedious task when documenting them, no matter what the format. Cheftap’s backup options ease the hesitation and after the reluctance fades, this app quickly becomes a trusted place to store any recipe, be it a favorite, new concoction or a piece of family heritage. The app is stable and we didn’t experience any crashing or freezing during usage. Cheftap is a free app for Android devices.

Price: Free

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