Many people don’t always find it easy to prepare home-cooked meals. Folks with 8-hour workdays usually eat out for lunch and grabs take-out for dinner. However, it’s not the healthiest option to eat out all the time and neither is it the most cost-effective. Hence, considering cooking at home might be best for both your body and your wallet. Although, that’s easier said than done because many people don’t even know the first thing about cooking. Thankfully, with a meal planning app like Paprika Recipe Manager 3, you now have higher chances of success. But is the app good enough for you and your home-cooking needs? Let’s find out.
Paprika Recipe Manager 3
Imagine you can record, organize, and manage your ingredients, recipes, and even your pantry all in one app. It would make life so much easier because, as any home cook knows, organizing all of that is exhausting. Fortunately, this kind of technology is available right now in Paprika Recipe Manager — and you can get one for yourself.
In 2010, Paprika Recipe Manager debuted as one of many apps you can get to assist you with home-cooked meals. As time went on, technology evolved, and so did Paprika Recipe Manager. Their team created multiple major and minor updates for their dedicated Paprika Recipe Manager users. Minor updates were always free, but larger updates came with a price tag. With its most recent major update, Paprika Recipe Manager 3, many regard Paprika to be the best recipe app available.
Paprika Recipe Manager 3: Features
As the name implies, Paprika Recipe Manager 3 is a recipe keeper that’s among the best in its class. Not only does it act as a recipe organizer, but it also has tools that actively helps you while cooking. Let’s take a look at everything Paprika Recipe Manager has to offer.
Organizing Recipes Is Never Troublesome With Paprika
Of course, no meal plan app is complete without proper recipe management and planning. Most people regard the Paprika Recipe Manager as the best cookbook app for this very reason. Not only does it neatly organize all of your recipes, but it also conveniently imports them from other websites.
Using the built-in browser, you can find and import recipes from other sources. Afterward, Paprika cleverly deciphers these recipes using natural language processing. To have a recipe maker enter ingredients this easily makes life more convenient!
Furthermore, Paprika Recipe Manager added the ability to format recipes however you want. People might take it for granted, but it used to be troublesome to view recipes because of confusing formatting. Now, you can add bold and italics to your recipes which can act as sub-headings or separators. You can also add photos to recipes so you can easily guide your future self and give references. Neat!
Moreover, the Paprika Recipe Manager helps users organize complex recipes through links. Imagine you’re creating a complicated dish that needs another dish as an ingredient. Thus, you need to create two dishes with recipes for both. With Paprika Recipe Manager, you can just link the recipe to the first dish that acts as an ingredient to the second next dish. No need to jump around and search between dishes as you’re cooking both!
Lastly, once you’re done inputting all your recipes, you can organize a meal plan for the entire month! Plan your week (or month) with a calendar that has all the recipes you need for each day. You can also add reusable menus in case you have favorite sets that you want to repeat. Say goodbye to exhausting meal planning and have them all in one app!
What About Grandmother’s Recipes?
Of course, not everyone just takes recipes off the internet and follows them without a thought. More creative home cooks like to make personal dishes with personal spices and flavors. Others may have family recipes passed down since their grandmother’s time, so they need to record those, too. Is there any way for Paprika Recipe Manager to import these recipes?
Of course, you can’t import them the way you do with recipes from the internet. However, Paprika does allow you to input personal recipes and gives tools to assist you. You can still use the same formatting tools like bold, italics, links, and adding pictures.
Moreover, you also have access to quick ingredients, measurements, and degrees (for temperature). Lastly, Paprika has an autocomplete feature so that you can add words easily just by typing the first few letters. With these, you can automate your recipe, just like those you find on the web.
Viewing And Managing Recipes In A Pinch
Of course, inputting individual recipes and creating weekly (or monthly) plans are crucial parts of meal planning. However, having a disorganized viewing experience is a headache in itself, and it’s important to get it right. Fortunately, the Paprika Recipe Manager ticks all the right boxes.
It can be difficult to find what you’re looking for when you already have thousands of recipes on-hand. Thankfully, searching for recipes with the Paprika Recipe Manager is fairly easy. Simply tap on the search bar and search for your recipe’s name.
You can also set it to search based on ingredients, directions, description, notes, source, or source URL. Afterward, just type in what you need, and voila, you’ll find the recipe you were looking for! You can sort your search as well by name, rating, or most recent.
While viewing recipes, you can also add them to your meal planner or grocery list, should you decide to. Just tap on the button (shopping cart or calendar) to add to either one. Moreover, you also have other options like printing, emailing, duplicating, or sharing the recipes with others.
Grocery Shopping, Anyone?
Paprika Recipe Manager is convenient for the home cook not only because of recipe management but also for grocery shopping. Once you’ve prepared your meal plans for the week (or month), Paprika Recipe Manager will auto-generate your grocery list.
This way, you won’t miss any ingredient you need in your pantry. Moreover, it not only lists the ingredients for you but formats them according to the grocery aisle. No need for aimless wandering until you find what you need or going back and forth between aisles. You can also customize these aisles because not all grocery stores are made the same.
Of course, Paprika Recipe Manager also knows you don’t always shop in the same grocery all the time. Some ingredients are present in only one store and might be missing in others. That’s why Paprika Recipe Manager also lets you make multiple grocery lists you can organize.
Let’s Organize The Fridge And Pantry!
Paprika Recipe Manager truly shows its prowess in its all-around service for home cooks. Not only does it organize your recipes, meal plans, and grocery list for you, but your pantry, too! That’s right, say goodbye to the days that you had to rip your hair out trying to organize the pantry. There’s no need to look for ingredients you may or may not have to add to your shopping list. That is, of course, if you take advantage of Paprika to organize all your home-cooking needs.
With the Pantry feature, you can now organize everything that’s in your cabinet and fridge. You can keep track of common household ingredients like salt, flour, pepper, sugar, garlic, etc. It doesn’t only record whether you have some or not, either. Paprika also includes the quantity of the item, if they’re out of stock, the purchasing date, and expiry date.
That expiry feature truly comes in handy so that you can eliminate how much food waste you generate! With the sorting feature (based on the aisle, date purchased, expiration, etc.), you can easily check which ingredients are expiring. That just means it’s time to get cooking!
The pantry also has handy organization features like moving items to the grocery list. You can do this manually; only choose the out of stock ingredients, move purchased items, or even everything if you want. This makes shopping and kitchen management a breeze. You won’t even have to get up and check your pantry to know when it’s time to go shopping!
Cooking Has Never Been This Easy
While having recipes available on-hand is great, Paprika Recipe Manager offers features that go further. That’s because they’ve added various features to ease your cooking even more. For example, Paprika allows you to tap on the direction that’s currently on-going. It’ll automatically highlight it so that you can focus on that step as you’re cooking. Moreover, Paprika will cross off any ingredients used during that step so that you can visibly see it’s been already used.
Also, Paprika detects automatic timers from a recipe’s description. Just tap on the timer and hit “start” to set it for that process. Not only that, but you can also set multiple timers in case you’re multitasking and doing more than one. Speaking of multitasking, if you’re using more than one recipe at a time, you can easily pin them. Pinning gives you easy access to both so you can easily switch between them.
Lastly, the Paprika Recipe Manager has great scaling and converting features. The first one, scaling, is the feature that lets you convert your portions based on serving size. Let’s say a recipe is set to be good for 4 people. However, you’ve invited your friends over and want to make a batch for 20. Paprika easily lets you scale your recipes so that the ingredients and batches you make can fit what you need. You can scale up or down, depending on your preferences.
On top of that, Paprika also has a nifty feature that can convert measurements. It’s easy to forget how many mL a ¼ cup has. Perhaps the recipe lists everything in Imperial measurements, but all your tools use the Metric System. Paprika easily lets you switch between both, so you don’t have to do the converting yourself.
All Your Devices
Of course, the Paprika Recipe Manager team knows people aren’t always glued to one device. For most people, they like using their desktop to manage and organize all the recipes. When it’s time to get cooking, most people switch to their iPad or tablet to view the recipes.
Once the weekend starts to come around, people take their phone’s grocery list out to go grocery shopping. That means most people use at least 3 devices to manage their home cooking needs. Paprika Recipe Manager knows this and, consequently, created cloud syncing across multiple platforms!
The app is available on almost all platforms you can think of: iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. It even has an Apple Watch companion app to help you stay more mobile while grocery shopping. That pretty much encompasses the entire world (no offense, Linux fans).
If you’ve bought multiple versions of the app on different platforms, you can easily sync using one account. All you need is to create a Paprika Cloud Sync account to make everything sync smoothly. Don’t worry, it’s free, so you don’t have to shed any more cash for this feature. With this account, Paprika can automatically backup and sync everything on your app. This includes your bookmarks, grocery list, menus, pantry, recipes, and everything else.
Paprika Recipe Manager 3: Price
Alright, so Paprika Recipe Manager 3 is hard to beat given all it has to offer. However, let’s address the elephant in the room: how much does it cost? Surely, something this expansive and all-encompassing costs a lot of money. To that we say, you’re wrong…and you’re right, but it depends.
As we’ve said, each version of Paprika Recipe Manager 3 is sold separately, depending on the platform. That means if you have an iPhone, a Windows Computer, and an Android tablet, you’d need to buy 3 separate versions. The price of the app for each platform is as follows:
- Windows: $29.99
- macOS: $29.99
- Android: $4.99
- iOS: $4.99
As you can see, buying 3 separate versions can easily add up to $40. If you’re serious about cooking and meal planning, it may be a worthy investment because of its extensive feature set. However, that decision will remain up to you.
The silver lining here is that Paprika offers sales from time to time. If you can catch a Thanksgiving or Black Friday sale, the cost can lower significantly. Last year’s sales offered the mobile versions for only $2.99 and the desktop versions for $14.99. That brings the total sale price to just $18, so you might want to keep an eye out for that.
Conclusion
Paprika Recipe Manager 3 is one of the best meal planning apps simply because of what it offers. It automates your meal planning, cooking, and recipe management all in one app. What’s more, Paprika organizes your entire kitchen with its automated grocery list and pantry features. It certainly makes cooking at home more convenient. Moreover, despite how much it can cost if you buy multiple versions, it’s still a worthy investment.
