Epicurious

Price: Free
The most popular cooking app (and perhaps most popular cooking website) out there, Epicurious was included in Time’s Best iPhone Apps 2011 list. It’s free and straightforward: a search feature lets you choose from their database of 30,000 recipes, organized helpfully by skill level or under categories like “Healthy Lunches” and “Dinner Party Ideas.” The grocery shopping list for each recipe can also be easily accessed while you’re at the supermarket. Other than that, there isn’t much, except the ability to mark favorite recipes, but you don’t really need much else if you’re already a reasonably competent home cook.

Jamie Oliver’s 20 Minute Meals

Price: US$7.99 (B240)
We’ll admit it: some people hate him, but BK has a declared Jamie Oliver bias. That aside, his app has been lauded across respectable lists on the web, plus it includes adorable videos of the man making food and imparting knife skills and other techniques. The app only comes with 60 recipes, which isn’t many compared to, say, Epicurious, but on the bright side, the app is already preloaded with them, so you won’t be waiting around trying to catch a signal. Other features that make it worthwhile are the portion adjustments, which expands the recipe depending on how many people are eating, the shopping list feature and even a randomizer, which gives you a random recipe when you shake your phone.

Cook Mate

Price: Free
Ever had a few random things left in your fridge at the end of the week and not known how to combine them to make a delicious dinner? As this is Bangkok and you are Bangkokians, probably not. But let’s say you’re stuck at home and have to cook something from your fridge, well, you tell Cook Mate what you have on hand, and Cook Mate comes up with a recipe for you that includes those ingredients. It even organizes search results into “your pantry is ready for this” and “you have to go buy some food.”

Mixologist: Drink Recipes

Price: Free
A boozy version of Cook Mate, Mixologist lets you enter all the types of booze and mixers you have left in your liquor cabinet and then searches a database of about 8,000 drinks to give you cocktails you can make without stumbling out of the house. A GPS locator gives you liquor stores in the area, but that’s only if you live in the US. The rest can still enjoy other features, like the Random Drink, which gives you cocktail recipes based on your entered choice of liquor, glassware, cocktail-type and more. A paid version of this app forgoes all the banner ads.

Kitchen Pad Timer

Price: US$1.99 (B60)
Pretty simple: this app lets you time up to four things cooking on your stove or in your oven at the same time, assigning different alarm tones to each so you can cook up a simultaneous storm. Too simple to warrant the two dollars? Well, we’re impressed by the cute graphic of an actual stove, which also lets you enter the heat level on each burner. If you have one of those depressing hot plates so common in new condos, it might take you a few tries to figure out the heat levels, but other than that, this is great.

Ask the Butcher

Price: US$1.99 (B60)
Chances are you know little about cuts of meat beyond pork chop and chicken breast. The Ask the Butcher app has several approaches to meat cuts: diagrams of lamb, beef, veal and pork for the browsing foodie, lists of various cuts for those of you scratching your heads over recipes you’d like to cook and recipes for various cuts. What’s also really neat is the timer the app provides. Enter the cut of meat and how well-done you want it, and it will give you a countdown. It also has a feature where you can look up local butchers, but that’s pretty useless in Bangkok. Still, this is a great app for a committed beginner.

Wine Enthusiast Guide

Price: US$4.99 (B150)
A bit pricier than your usual apps, the Wine Enthusiast Guide is so expensive because it has details, prices and reviews of over 100,000 wines. If you know what you’re drinking, just look it up, and if you need suggestions, use the Search feature to enter your taste and price preferences and let the app pull up some options for you. For the advanced user, the Vintage chart gives you a generalized year-by-year overview of 125 wine regions and styles so you know when to drink your bottle, or whether the vintage a restaurant is selling is any good.

Wine Notes

Price: Free
For the more advanced and enthusiastic wine drinker, Wine Notes is really a smartphone version of one of those Moleskine type diaries where you record the details of every wine you drink. The interface allows you to easily enter a picture of the label and details like varietal, vintage and region, along with more involved notes on flavors and aromas. Once you have a collection of wine notes, you can search for them easily with the search function as well as share individual impressions on Facebook and Twitter.

What About My Android?

Epicurious, Jamie Oliver’s 20-MInute Meals, Mixologist and Wine Notes are also available on Android Marketplace.