Editors’ Choice celebrates the very best apps and games—handpicked by App Store Editors around the world.
Offering serious culinary smarts that home cooks will savor, this elegant digital recipe box manages to elevate the joy of cooking (and meal planning and grocery list wrangling) for us every time we fire it up.
We knew we loved it when: We saw how easy it is to add recipes. Come across a promising carbonara online? Tap the Share button in your browser and send the page to Mela; the app knows to ignore the elaborate personal intro and will import just the recipe. Mela’s scanning function is equally seamless. Snap a pic of a cookbook page (even an elaborately designed one), then tap a block of text to assign it to a section of the recipe, like Ingredients or Notes.
Biggest surprise: How Mela smartly scales your recipes. For example, if you’ve recorded the flour in your Japanese soufflé pancake recipe in both volume and weight (“30 g or ¼ cup cake flour”), Mela knows to adjust both figures—and displays them in bold red type for easy scanning. The app can also convert measurements from metric to the U.S. standard on the fly (just tap the Adjust button), so feel free to dive into those Italian food blogs. Buon appetito!
Our favorite discovery: Full-screen cook mode, which displays one step of a recipe at a time in a font large enough to view from the other side of the kitchen. To move to the next step, tap anywhere on the upper or lower half of the screen. (You can use your knuckle if your fingertips are dirty—we’ve tested this!)