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Christmas on iOS: the best food and drink apps

Christmas is here – and it’s hungry. Or rather you and your guests will be. Fortunately, your iPhone and iPad can help you make all manner of tasty treats – if you have the right apps installed. This is part four of our ongoing Christmas series; if you missed the others, you can find them below.

Part one: the best apps for making plans.
Part two: the best apps for gift shopping.
Part three: the best travel and weather apps.

Christmas food and drink

Whether it’s your turn to cook, or you just fancy offering a helping hand, there are some superb apps for use in the kitchen. Here’s our pick of the best ones to have installed this Christmas. It’s like having a little gaggle of chefs in your pocket. If only they could do the actual cooking, too!

Kitchen Stories [Free]

This is our favorite cookbook app, mostly because it’s so elegant and well thought out. Not only does the app tempt with gorgeous photography, but recipes provide step-by-step photo instructions, so you know what everything should look like at each point. How-to videos give you basic tips, too, if you’re caught on the hop and asked to assist in getting Christmas dinner ready.

Kitchen Stories

Tasty [Free]

To some extent, Tasty comes across like Kitchen Stories for people with low attention spans. In place of minimalism, there are splashes of vibrant color. And rather than tastefully shot photography (although Tasty does have some of that), you get super-fast videos of each dish being made alongside step-by-step instructions. The videos are certainly a useful way to nail a technique, though, even if they do look like a close-up of a TV chef’s efforts being played back in fast-forward.

Tasty

Yummly [Free]

The idea behind Yummly is to put every recipe in the world in your pocket. It roams popular foodie websites and enables you to quickly search for food by cuisine, taste, diet, technique, and all kinds of other keywords. You can save ingredients lists, along with storing favorite recipes for next time around.

Yummly

Paprika [$5/£5]

Another option for when you need to unleash your inner chef during the holidays, Paprika is a full-fledged kitchen organizational tool like no other. It lets you roam your favorite foodie websites and pilfer interesting recipes. These can then be stored, edited, and later referred to when you get cooking. Timers, meal plans, and schedules top off the tastiest cooking app on iOS for anyone who wants to feel more in control of recipes they save – and what they cook.

Paprika

Unit Converter [Free]

If you’re an American looking quizzically at a recipe in metric, or someone elsewhere wondering what on earth a ‘cup’ is, you need a unit converter. Some recipes apps and websites have them built in. If you find one that doesn’t, use Unit Converter instead. This isn’t by any stretch a pretty app, but it’s effective, making it a cinch to quickly convert volumes, weights, temperatures, length and anything else you fancy.

Unit Converter

Cocktail Flow [Free + IAP]

Turkey? Fine. Potatoes? Whatever. If your idea of food and drink tends towards the latter during the holidays, grab a copy of Cocktail Flow. This free app provides hundreds of recipes, including a Christmas collection (such as Chocolatini, Jingle Juice, and, er, Russian Santa). And if you’re feeling contrary – or just freezing cold – head to the poolside options, don some earbuds, blast summer music into your ears, and pretend you’re on a beach somewhere.

Cocktail Flow