Crouton: Recipe Manager

Imports recipes seamlessly, supports folders, tagging and lets you do meal planning. All in a modern, simple UX. So many apps like this are painful to use, but I knew I would be purchasing this after about 30 seconds of opening it.

This recipe manager app is the best! I love its interface, which is very similar to the stock iOS look.

You can only store 5 recipes unless you pay for more.

This is an amazing app that has made our weekly meal planning and grocery shopping simple. It looks great, works great, and best of all had a lifetime option at the time. The downside is the new discovery feature is an additional fee, there is no cuisines you can attach or sort recipes by, and struggles with importing compared to some others.

Unfortunately, I have had to stop using the app and switched to a competitor because of a number of small but important issues for me. I have found that the app gets slow when having a large library and lacks some organization tools to make managing recipes easier. In addition, there are a large number of ui quirks that make use difficult as fixing them requires either switching to another section of the app and back or sometimes restarting the app altogether. I submitted these issues to the developer a few months ago, who essentially blew me off and said thanks for the feedback but he’s been too busy since winning the Apple design award and would consider fixing the issues if he has time. Since then, a number of new versions have been released, and only a single issue I reported was resolved. I also have a number of issues with recipe import. The biggest is support for sites that may be a little less known. When trying to import, I frequently have to manually import the picture, steps, and ingredients list even on sites that support the standard recipe schema. These issues make the share sheet fairly worthless for a lot of sites since you can’t copy and paste the missing data while that’s up. I have to either save the mostly blank recipe and go edit it or jump to the app and import there. The other thing I would prefer to see changed when importing pages is how the title is generated. Right now, it pulls the page title, which is often rewritten for SEO, and includes non-relevant data like the site name. I think it should use the recipe name from the page content instead. I know this isn’t perfect either, but it’s closer to correct more often than the page title. My last issue is the app says it can import recipes from Instagram. Unfortunately, I have yet to get it to work and always get back a blank recipe dialog with none of the fields filled out. Not sure if it’s just bad luck with the ones I’ve tried, but ultimately, I gave up on the feature.

You don’t need any other recipe app at all. Loving it so much.

This is one of the best apps I’ve purchased. I love it! However, it used to sync between all my family members and no longer does. It used to be much better for this reason.

I had to do a lot of editing in a recipe since the app misunderstood the scanned recipe, especially since my recipe had a separate crust section and its’ ingredients were thrown in with the main chicken pot pie ingredients.

What happened to the fun sidebar icon colors?

The app is good but I don’t know why nobody is talking about how it’s $25 once you want to have more than 5 recipes. Paprika is the #1 paid app in this category and it’s exactly like this app but it’s $5. I switched over and love it.