How to Build a Proper Recipe Collection: 5 Apps Worth Using

Everyone’s recipe collection starts the same way: a few screenshots, a bookmarked page or two, maybe a note scribbled in your phone after a friend described how they make their curry. 

It works fine, right up until you actually need to find something in it. Six months later, that “collection” is scattered across four apps and a camera roll, and the one recipe you actually want has vanished.

A good recipe app should fix that: one place to keep everything, organised well enough that you’d actually go back to it. We looked at five of the most popular options in the UK to see which ones do that job best.

Want a collection you’ll actually use, not just build?

Cherrypick’s collection of recipes is designed around a simple idea: a saved recipe is only useful if it’s easy to act on. The library covers several hundred dishes, from quick weeknight staples to more involved weekend cooking, and every recipe sits within a wider planning system rather than as an isolated card. Choose one, and the ingredients can be sent straight through to a UK supermarket basket, no rewriting a shopping list required.

That’s the part most recipe collections miss. It’s one thing to have a well-organised library. It’s another for that library to actually shorten the distance between “I fancy cooking this” and dinner being on the table. Portion sizes and ingredients are also built with UK kitchens in mind, so there’s rarely the guesswork of adjusting American cup measurements or substituting ingredients that aren’t easy to find locally.

Prefer recipes you know have been properly tested?

BBC Good Food’s collection is arguably the most trusted in the country, built up over decades and tested rigorously before publication. If reliability is what matters most to you, browsing this archive rarely leads to disappointment, and the range, from midweek dinners to full Sunday roasts, is genuinely vast.

Its collection tools are fairly basic, though. It functions more as a searchable recipe archive than a system for planning or shopping around what you save.

Got recipes scattered across social media already?

Samsung Food solves a very specific, very common problem: the pile of saved Instagram reels and TikToks that never quite turn into meals. It imports that content and organises it into a proper, searchable collection, which is a genuine time-saver for anyone who cooks from social media regularly.

It works best as a rescue tool for existing saves rather than a source of new recipes in its own right, and there’s no shopping or planning layer built on top.

Enjoy discovering what other home cooks are making?

Cookpad’s collection is built entirely from user-submitted recipes, which gives it a character the more polished apps don’t quite have. Recipes come with tips and variations from other home cooks, and the sheer volume of everyday, practical dishes is impressive.

Because there’s no professional testing process, quality varies more than with a curated source, and the app itself is fairly basic beyond browsing and saving.

Feeding a crowd without spending a fortune?

Mob Kitchen has built a loyal following around recipes designed to stretch further: big batch meals, low-cost ingredients, and food that’s genuinely built to feed several people well. It’s a great addition to a collection focused on students, families, or anyone watching costs closely.

The range is more specialised than a general-purpose recipe app, so it works best as a complement to a wider collection rather than the whole thing.

Final thought

A good recipe collection isn’t just about how many dishes you’ve saved, it’s about whether you’ll ever cook them. BBC Good Food, Cookpad, Samsung Food, and Mob Kitchen each bring something genuinely useful to the table, whether that’s trust, variety, dietary precision, or budget-friendly cooking. 

But for a collection that goes all the way from “I want to cook this” to a completed shop, Cherrypick remains the strongest option on this list.