With so many superb food festivals celebrating the world of great cuisine taking place across the UK these days we decided to round-up the best GALAXY S4 and Note 8.0 apps to take advantage of all the great produce on offer and to turn you into a digital masterchef.
So get your Samsung GALAXY S4 or Note 8.0 into the kitchen and let it help you hunt out local produce, find and organise recipes, choose the best accompaniments for meals or just put handy kitchen tools at your fingertips, helping you to make light work of even the most fiendish recipes.
Sourcing and choosing ingredients and finding recipes
1. Boskoi
Free - get it here
Foraging is all the rage nowadays, seeking out wild, seasonal produce to create great-tasting meals. To help you in your own foraging quest there's the Boskoi app, which lets foragers add reports of where you can find local food in your area to create a map of the edible landscape.
Each report lets you navigate to the location marked using Google Maps, describes what food can be found there and will even have a link to the relevant Wikipedia page so you can learn more about the ingredients if you are unfamiliar with them. It's an open source project reliant on people tagging food they've found, so results will vary according to where you live, but it's well worth a try to help you source free ingredients.
2. Evernote Food
Free - get it here
Seen an ingredient, technique or recipe you want to remember? Just whip out your GALAXY S4 or Note 8.0 and using the high-definition camera you can capture the moment, add a note or record a quick voice reminder. With Evernote Food at your fingertips, you'll never forget a great restaurant meal or a food festival cooking tip again.
The app also has loads of great recipes to browse for inspiration, a restaurant locator plus a cookbook section for you to store your favourite recipes in. If you already have an Evernote account your recipes and notes will be backed up there too.
3. Epicurious
Free - get it here
Epicurious is a comprehensive recipe listings app with contributions from top chefs, restaurants and food magazines. If browsing a food festival has put you in the mood to create something extravagant, then choosing the "I cook like a pro" option will filter the 280,000 recipes listed on Epicurious to those that will really challenge you in the kitchen.
Epicurious also offers categories like 'Weeknight dinners' and 'Decadent desserts', and lets you save recipes you really like to a Favourites menu. Also, if you've just bought a fancy ingredient from a farmer's market and aren't sure what to make, the Epicurious search function will find you a recipe by keyword, and it will save the other ingredients needed to create a shopping list too.
4. ChefTap
Free - get it here
Wouldn't it be great if you could collate all your favourite recipes together in one place, no matter how or where you found them? ChefTap does exactly this – you can import recipes from any website, import recipes stored as text files, import recipes from a URL, or just copy and paste them in directly. It can even search your Chrome bookmarks for recipes.
It takes three taps on a browser to save a recipe (tap the browser Menu button, tap Share, tap ChefTap) and the app will import the recipe on the page, images and all. You can also edit anything if you want to amend it, add your own notes, or correct it. A truly impressive recipe organiser.
5. Hello Vino
Free - get it here
Got a new favourite meal but don't know which wine will make the perfect accompaniment? Hello Vino is your friend. You can find the perfect wine for anything from roast turkey to Pad Thai and the wine suggestions are listed along with tasting notes and other food pairings, plus the ability to add the wine to your favourites.
It's a US-centric app – the prices are in dollars – but with such an extensive wine list, the detailed recommendation engine and wine reviews collated from numerous sites and blogs, this app is highly recommended to help you find that perfect drink/meal combination.
Hello Vino can help you pair drinks with meals too, recommending what meal to cook with your favourite wine.
6. Cocktail Flow
Free - get it here
Not a wine drinker? There is no better aperitif/accompaniment for a meal than a well-made cocktail, and Cocktail Flow comes with handy instructions on how to make many famous drinks for free (you can add additional cocktails linked by theme, for example New Year, by buying extra recipe bundles).
It will also match the cocktail recipe to the drinks you have available. You can search for cocktail recipes by spirit, cocktail type and even by colour. You can also download a non-alcoholic cocktail package for free, for those who don't want a sore head the next morning.
Cocktail Hero is also free and well worth a look, if only because of its much more extensive cocktail list.
Kitchen tools
7. Kitchen Dictionary FREE
Free - get it here
To cook like a pro you have to speak the lingo, and there are a lot of terms you need to understand if you are to become a culinary master. Now you need never get confused by a cooking term again with this free kitchen dictionary that covers everything from Al dente (neither soft nor over done) to Zushi (seasoned rice used for sushi).
The entries are all spelled out in plain English, with a quick A–Z look-up, so you have no excuse for not recreating any of the fancy menu terms you may come across.
If the ads are too much for you, you could upgrade to the paid version for the princely sum of 64p.
8. Recipe Calculator
Free - get it here
If there is one thing you need to get right when creating culinary masterpieces, it's ingredient amounts, but recipes often come in a bewildering variety of units. Step up the free Recipe Calculator app. It has a typical calculator layout but with additional buttons for fractions as well as specific conversion buttons built in, meaning you can quickly convert recipe instructions like 1/3 of a cup into millilitres.
It also lets you upscale recipes, so if you have a recipe for four people but need to make it for six, you can convert the ingredient measurements to the correct amounts needed. For ease, you can also set the app to always start up with millimetres or cups as the default unit.
9. Ratio
£3.19 - buy it here
There are some that say there is a magic formula to cooking, and this is the basis of cookery writer Michael Ruhlman's book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind The Craft Of Everyday Cooking, which this app is based on.
Michael believes that perfect cooking is based on 32 basic ingredient-to-ingredient relationships. He argues that once you understand these ratios, you can create a fantastic dish every time no matter what's in your food cupboard.
This app does all the hard calculations for you, so you can build any recipe to match what you want to cook and eat. Seasonal cooking just got scientific.
10. Kitchen Timer
Free - get it here
A good kitchen timer is essential in the kitchen, and this one has a large visual display so you can easily keep track of how much time you have left – especially so on the generous screen of the GALAXY Note 8.0 or S4. It also has a digital readout on the screen above the dial.
Just move the cursor to the time you want, adjust it by the handy +30s or +1m buttons at the bottom and press play when you want it to start (you can also type in the exact time you want).
Swiping left lets you set a second timer, so you can have two things on the go at once. The app also comes with a choice of alarm sounds, and you can set the volume to suit the noise level in your kitchen.