We’ve been at this for over 15 years, but somewhere around recipe number 3,000, we started noticing a problem. Not with the recipes, those were generally pretty dang good. The problem was everything around them. The frantic tab-switching mid-cook. The phone screen going dark just as you needed to check the next step. The “I have this, but what can I cook with it?”. The endless ads (well, they are a necessity to keep the lights on).
If you’ve cooked from the internet in the last decade, you know the feeling. So we set out to fix it, and we think we pretty much have.
The Honest Cooking app is out now, and it has the full weight of 5,000+ original recipes behind it; every one written, tested, and photographed by our team, spanning Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Thai, Indian, French, Mediterranean, and American cooking. Browse by cuisine, difficulty, collections, or time, or just scroll until something makes you hungry, which usually doesn’t take long. 
A Revolutionary Cook Mode
Before you start cooking a recipe, the app gives you a quick checklist so you’re not discovering mid-sauté that you’re out of shallots. Then it guides you step by step, swipeable, with timers you can stack and run simultaneously, a screen that stays on, and your place held automatically. Keep your hands in the dough, and your eyes off the phone.
When you’re done, you can rate it, leave yourself a note, or just move on. If it sounds geniously simple, it’s because it is. It’s also very pretty.
Your recipes. Your own filing system.
You can save anything to your personal library and sort it however your brain works. “Things That Impressed My Mother-In-Law,” “Tuesday Survival Mode,” or whatever makes sense to you. The app also gives you seasonal collections, editorial spotlights, and curated sets if you’d rather browse than build.
A meal plan that knows YOU
Tell the app what you like, where you live (the app checks the weather), what you’re avoiding, and roughly how your week goes and who you’re eating with. It gives you back seven dinners from your saved recipes, your top-rated meals, and some well-chosen new picks, and lets you pin nights, skip evenings out, and swap anything that doesn’t feel right. When it looks perfect, one tap turns the whole plan into a shopping list with quantities merged and duplicates removed. Dinner planning was never easier.
Two paths for cooks who want to get better
The app also helps you learn new things! 100 Basics walks you through the building blocks: a proper vinaigrette, a pan sauce, braised short ribs, homemade pasta. Each one comes with a key tip from our editors and space for your notes. Work through them in order or skip around, and track your progress.
100 Classics is the companion to that, the legendary dishes every cook should eventually know. Coq au vin. Pad thai. Carbonara. Mole. Track and mark each as mastered and watch the list shrink as you build your library of mastered dishes.
Cook with what you have!
Open Pantry Search, type in what you actually have, and the app tells you what you can make with it, along with a clear breakdown of what you’d need to add. Half a butternut squash, some coconut milk, a lime: suddenly dinner has options.
Free to explore. Premium for the full kitchen.
All 5,000+ recipes are free to browse, search, and read. You can try all the premium features too, for free. Premium unlocks unlimited access to cook mode, meal planning, pantry search, cloud shopping lists, progress tracking, personal notes, and the complete Basics and Classics experience. There’s a seven day free trial, so you can find out what you’ve been missing before committing to anything.
The app is available for free download on the App Store now (Android version coming soon!). Let’s cook something good!
Just downloaded it and so far it looks beautiful. Thank you!
the app is amazing!
I downloaded this last night and spent the evening browsing the app. It was very impressive, I loved all the features but my favorite was the basic and classic recipes that I didn’t see here on the site. Such a great thing to have access to as I often forget how to make some of the old, simple things. Now I know where to find them instead of googling things like “classic vinaigrette”.