NYT Cooking: Recipes & Tips Reviews

by ATXCooper

Well here is a classic example of an app with fake reviews. Unfortunately, for NYT it’s the good reviews that are fake. It’s just not possible for an app to have a field goal rating of distribution. About half of the reviews are five stars and the other half is 1 star with just a few sprinkled among the 2/3/4 stars. If you search for recipe apps then look at the ratings, each of them will have a downhill rating: meaning the majority of the reviews are 5 stars with fewer and fewer ratings distributed amongst the stars 4-3-2-1. Don’t believe the 5 star reviews for any app when you see an equal distribution of 5 and 1 star reviews. In the case of the NYT cooking app, most of the 1 star reviews are from users that believe the annual price of NYTCooking is just too much, I am in that group. When NYTCooking used to be free, I used it daily and Ioved it. I might even have given it a 4 or 5 star rating. Did NYTCooking crash from time to time, yes it did. But I didn’t care. Did I experience issues with my saved recipes? Yes, but I didn’t mind. NYTCooking was free and with free you accept these issues. NYTCooking is unfortunately just not priced correctly to get the rating it deserves.

by Alitaccd

I was happy with NYTCooking , and then one of my credit cards expired and I forgot to update it. Then came… the slew of threatening-sounding emails saying my payment is “past due,” “urgent billing notice,” etc. So then I had had it and went to cancel the subscription, and that’s when I saw the dark pattern. It says you have to call to cancel, but then you log into your account and there’s another option to cancel by chatting with an agent. There is no other way to cancel your subscription- you can’t do it on your own on NYTCooking or website like you can with almost any other subscription service. And if you don’t pay the past due amount for the subscription you weren’t using anyway, you’ll just keep getting the emails. Even after you cancel your subscription. Yikes.

I wonder how much money NYT actually gets back this way, and if it actually offsets the cost of having chat and phone agents dealing with subscription cancellations, which I can imagine is one of the top reasons people contact them.

Anyway, I was planning to cancel and maybe come back at a later date when I’m done traveling, but because of this dark pattern and threatening emails I plan to never come back. Hope that last $5 was worth it!

by Mr1379

Like most app users, I expect that the AI behind the apps I use is intelligent enough to provide meaningful personalization. I’ve used NYTCooking for 3 years, and my recommended recipes primarily point to meat and cocktails. I’ve never made a single recipe from NYTCooking with meat of any kind, so these suggestions are remarkable. And, of course, I can skip over them, but the point of apps (particularly those with a pay wall-at least in part) is that they learn my behavior and then make useful suggestions to help me find the kinds of recipes that in turn bring me back to NYTCooking . A lot of the recipes are good, but as this as a review of NYTCooking itself, and NYTCooking ’s AI is a bit lazy, so the review is correspondingly low. Also, a good number of the vegetarian recipes include things like chicken stock and parm, which of course makes it not a vegetarian recipe. And while the omnivore argument is “can’t you just skip it” yes, of course, but I think I can also reasonably expect that a recipe marked vegetarian actually is what it says it is.

by Dzitnup

When I first got it I thought it was great. It has slowly gone downhill though, to the point where it’s not even really useful anymore and definitely not worth the price. It just feels like NYTCooking is being neglected, and with every update it gets worse. It was great that you can save recipes from other sites, but now NYTCooking no longer shows the pictures of non-NYT recipes so you have to read the title of each one to find what you want. Forget about browsing through your saved recipes to find visual inspiration for dinner! Also, it does not allow you to organize non-NYT recipes into different folders... Thus in order to find anything I have try and remember the exact title of the recipe I’m looking for and scroll through dozens of recipe names hoping to find it. It is literally easier to google it and just find the recipe online again. The final insult was that now it makes you sign in every single time you use it which is a huge PITA... I’m not really worried about someone stealing my recipes!
If you’re just saving NYT recipes this would be adequate but if you want to save all your online recipes in one place, look elsewhere. I switched to Paprika.

by Dhdjwofh Jd

I love the NYT cooking app and use it regularly. I do have some observations/complaints:
1. Recipe of the day - recipes that are clearly event/seasonal specific are not posted far enough in advance to be useful. E.g. todays Fresh Ham with balsamic glaze posted the day before Easter, a great pie recipe was posted March 13. In order for a recipe to be useful, people need a little more lead time to plan (a week?). Yes we can search ahead for what we want, and I do, but I’ve had a few sad moments seeing a recipe id love to make for Thanksgiving or Christmas the day(s) before or even day of the holiday — too late to matter.
2. Search capabilities need to be improved as many others have noted, with more fields and limit/sort options.
3. Ratings seem a bit skewed — i dont think I’ve ever seen a posted recipe rated below 4 stars, even if many of the comments are negative. How can this be remedied? I feel like epicurious does a much better job of “using the whole rating scale.”

by Bj28$

This is my go-to place for finding and then organizing recipes. It is easy to use, and wonderful for exploring and for finding help on cooking techniques. The ability to add recipes from other online sites is a generous plus. The whole design of NYTCooking is elegant and clean.

My one (minor, but...) complaint that keeps from getting this 5 stars is that the categories were added a few releases ago and I cannot override or change them. I had already set up my own categories at that point and the “enforced” ones are more numerous and also more general than I like. The Brunch category for example duplicates a category I had set up, but about 80% of our selections match—do I sort through each group and modify (tricky to do on a mobile phone!) so I can delete my old Brunch category, or do I leave both of them.....grrrr. Some of the new categories are general—Dinner for example—where I would rather set up my own according to type of food—casserole, meat, nonmeat, etc.

I would like to be able to do away with the NYT defined categories altogether, but can’t see a way to do that. So I am left with all their new categories, many of my own, and lots of duplication. It’s frustrating in an otherwise well designed app. I still consider it my favorite and highly recommend it.

by MarGraWhi

I almost exclusively cook NYT recipes as I’ve been continually impressed by how good they turn out— I suggest NYTCooking to all my friends. But I gotta say— it’s a tough sell, let me tell you why.

Do I love paying $4 a month, on top of the $4 I pay for the NYT news subscription? No, I think that’s a little much, especially given the sadly unremarkable features (or lack thereof) on NYTCooking itself. I gotta say, I stick around for the amazing recipes. But for that extra $4 I would really love to see more out of NYTCooking — for example, categorizing by meal or recipe type, search improvements/better filtering, access to videos that have previously been featured on the front page (where do these go?), that sort of thing. I come back to NYTCooking all the time and think a lot more people would be hooked too, if NYTCooking was a little more user friendly.

by Sad 3

The NYT cooking app has given a new lease on life to my nightly dinner prep. I search NYTCooking almost every evening for inspiration about how to make a tasty meal from the random items in my fridge - that still-snowy-white cauliflower I bought a week ago, the frozen shrimp, the impulse purchase of a new harissa sauce. It never fails me. If I don’t have all the ingredients in a recipe, I don’t run to the store, but improvise. I substitute parsley for cilantro, sweet onions for leeks, or just omit. I love that all the recipes are attributed to chefs I’ve come to know from regular reading of the Times, so I can prioritize my favorites, whose tastes are a good match for my household’s. This alone makes NYTCooking far more reliable than the recipes that pop up on a random Google search. If I happen to be connected to a printer, I print a hard copy for reference in the kitchen. If not, I prop up my smart phone or tablet on the kitchen counter, fetch my ingredients from the convenient list at the top, and switch over to a news program to stave off kitchen ennui while I chop and simmer. My only complaint is that the recipes tend to underestimate prep and cooking time, so I’ve learned it’s best to allow some extra time. But the $39/year was a great expenditure.

by Annetteebe

I love NYT recipes! I love reading the forum commentary and definitely read the comments about each recipe I am interested in. Here are some suggestions though. I would really like to be able to vote whether or not a comment is helpful within NYTCooking (option only available on desktop version). I would like to be able to comment back directly to a comment (like to ask a question to a commenter). I would like the option to save a specific comment to my recipe box (Allrecipes does this. Very useful.) Lastly - if you accidentally click on the “stars”, which is a common place to click to view comments on many other websites, you can’t back out of the mistake - you are forced to rate a recipe that you probably have not even made. This has happened to me multiple times! Ugh. (Note this last comment may be in the phone and not desktop or app version. Cant remember. But it is most definitely a flaw).

by 888K888

I use NYTCooking on the iPad and iPhone many times a week and it has really improved our range of meals! I now turn to it first - even though we have many cookbooks - as the search function always reveals new ways of using an ingredient. The photos are appealing, serve as good models for plating the dish, and generally represent the end result accurately.

The ratings and comments are also really helpful. I also like the way the iPad app stays on while cooking, rather than timing out to the lock screen.

Wishlist for iPad app version: (1) nutrition info, (2) scaling recipes function, (3) ability to copy from comments and/or pin them to top of list for future reference, (4) dimming after a couple of minutes of inactivity, and undimming with an easy tap — to save screen and battery life.

by Former Agent

BC (before Covid) I looked to NYT and its amazing parade of food artists for a new idea or a new way to entertain guests or wow family (so the kids would visit more often) with new dishes or a twist on the old ones. DC (during) is making this more important than ever even if there are only the two of us in it together for the ling haul. Food is a variable when we are all starved for social stimulus and the normal variations in life that are stymied by C. Like so many, I’ve made bread for the first time—successfully—thanks to Mark Bittman and countless reader tips along with his own updates to a recipe that should be awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Who can disagree over hot bread and butter? And the perfected recipes that pop up daily or I find as I search the site have resulted from the in perfect hasslebacks, amazing skillet chops and steaks, 1137 recipes for amazing chicken dishes. Honestly, I now have a collection of food porn pictures and I never photographed anything but the beautiful cakes I made BC. I bought my sister a subscription for her birthday because every night now she wants a pix of what’s for dinner and an explanation of how to make it. Totally worth it! It’s my cooking Geritol!

by 608648421

After over 35 years of teaching, I finally retired and was able to slow down and enjoy life. Sadly less than half a year later, those dreams were dashed when I suddenly found myself a full time caregiver for my husband. On top of that, the pandemic hit, and our world shrunk down to a five-room condo and leaving home was too dangerous to even think about. As options dwindled, I filled my days with activities that could be done safely. Planning and preparing daily meals became a welcome outlet! Thanks to that NYT cooking section and app, I have endless meals to try, and as things gradually open up once again, I have bright spots in my otherwise often challenging days, when I can forget, if only for a moment, that life can still be fun! My endless thanks to NYT for keeping me sane!

by Maobfh

Every chef will have a decent take on most recipes, which will do in a pinch. But no chef and no team is going to have the traditional recipe for every dish in every cuisine on the globe with suggestions on what you can do to make it fantastic. New York City is one of a handful of cities in which every country and ethnicity is represented. Where else can you find what is a reasonable substitute when a rare ingredient is out of season, or how to manage a hard dried stored version of a hard to find and mostly unknown ingredient? If my friend is homesick for the Singaporean Chicken and Rice she grew up on, I want to have the real thing when she gets here and I will look here. If I want to reinstate our family tradition of making sweet chile rellenos the day before a holiday and I can’t remember how much cloves to add, I am going to look here. It is possible to have a cookbook for most cuisines, but not all. But someone in NY remembers making dumplings with their mom in Tibet before the family escaped and arrived in NYC and they will contribute the recipe if someone needs it. I have not looked for every recipe I mentioned so I hope I don’t disappoint but if you need one that is not here, then ask! And it WILL be here. This is, hands down, my go to if I want the REAL recipe for…well…Anything!

by JWMoise

To me, NYTCooking is second to none. The content is created by fantastically talented, creative and straightforward food people. No fluff to the descriptions, just the facts you need and some additional insight that will make you a wiser cook. Simple emails up to the most complex, explained in laymen’s terms. It is searchable, creates shopping lists (where you can delete items you already have!) and easy to use when executing your chosen dish(es). I read the daily/weekly emails for the past year, got a free trial of NYTCooking , and now have NYTCooking (I couldn’t live without it, actually) and can say that my cooking skills and creativity have been elevated dramatically! If you like to cook and want to get better, NYTCooking is for you. Combine it with the emails from the Times staff and you’re basically getting an education (or refresher) that will help you grow your skills and culinary sophistication one meal at a time!

by Bevatron

Of course we all know the NYT to be a fantastic (and for some people the only) source. When my spouse began working overnight and we added the Instapot and Braun hand mixers to our tiny San Francisco apartment - this resource became a necessary replacement for about 85% of our spontaneous dining out adventures. I love how readers (chefs) can comment directly on the recipe or ingredients (worth 2 stars). I also love how this can be nearly added to your personal journaling or self care routines (worth another 2 stars). The NYT have selected fairly achievable efforts - but a Whole Foods or accessible farmer’s markets really help with the projects. Be prepared to pay more than restaurant prices and to handle leftovers - kind of not allowed in our small apartment - that is where the overnight colleagues come in. You’ll hopefully come to NYTCooking for the creativity and life choices and stay for the compliments and gratitude of others. Food and shared food experiences is one of the strongest pillars of a life well lived.

by Oma Dai

You have to understand that NYTCooking is a lot more than a collection of excellent recipes. It’s a talk show, a set of instruction videos, a daily food essay that gets you excited to be back in the kitchen ASAP. AND a collection of recipes from the best of the best. OK - so - there are just a few things that may be less than perfect. 1) I have to go elsewhere for Mexican food (REAL Mexican food) which happens to be my personal yum. I lived in Mexico and know how amazing that food can be - the fresh fruit batidos, the aguas, the taqueria salsas, the rich mole sauces, the soups with squash flowers.... 2) The recipe book can be difficult to manipulate. Deleting recipes from it is not intuitive. I’d love more options - like easily making up a set of recipes for a dinner party then dissolving (or back-filing) the set when the party’s over. Or saving a recipe with my personal fiddles and edits attached. But I LOVE NYTCooking, this daily inspiration. And - hey - my family and friends now believe I’m
a good cook! Where did THAT come from? Guess!

by Sndptyinsd

I dragged my feet for years because I hate signing up for things because so many companies make it hard to cancel. NYT made so much of their COVID coverage for free so I found myself on their site a lot and received their emails so I figured I would give the NYT Cooking app a try. I have tried so many cooking apps over the years and haven’t really kept using them but my trial is up and now I don’t know that I want to give up NYT Cooking! I really like how the ingredients and prep are on different tabs, so that I don’t have to scroll. I find the reviews are really helpful too, as some people will post a twist or advice about achieving best results. The pictures are great and I really appreciate how to app stays lit so that I don’t have to touch my phone with dirty hands while I’m cooking. Its easy to bookmark recipes to save for later and offers an easy filter or free form text search. They really couldn’t make it easier unless they came to my house and did it for me, thank you NYT!

by Wordsmith 001

I own (too) many cookbooks, but since this service got into high gear the books are languishing on the shelves. The range is broad, the instructions clear, the outcomes generally satisfying. NYTCooking uses simple computer techniques for searching and grouping and filing very effectively, and having your own virtual Recipe Box to which you can add your own comments is handy indeed. The prep times are sometimes understated, and sometimes I disagree with the relative proportions, but the differences have not been serious and even a mildly experienced cook can handle the details with relative ease. Users’ comments are welcomed and archived, so you can easily benefit from other cooks’ experiences and creative suggestions. If a recipe has been on the website for a while you can often discover through the comments extremely helpful nuances and techniques. And the recipes include a broad variety of cuisines, making for some fun and delicious new dishes for the family table. Thank you, New York Times.

by Garol Northbrother

The recipes are so worth the money but NYTCooking is annoying to use. Anytime your phone screen goes into rest mode (dark after x minutes, whatever your setting), or you are in a different app for too long, NYTCooking refreshes you back to the main landing page. Which means you have to search for the recipe you are cooking every time you turn away from the phone. Not helpful when you may only have one finger not dirty and just want to see what ingredient goes in next.
Also the saving feature is horrible. I wish they would use the same touch/responsiveness options as Pinterest say, where you can hold down on a recipe and a menu of which recipe box to save it in appears. As it is now, the first time you tap on the save button, no matter how long you hold it down, you can’t save it to an individual recipe list, just your general bookmarks. You must then press and hold on the tiny banner for it to then ask you if you want to save it onto a recipe box, then you go through to find which one. Makes creating quick recipe lists really laborious.

I love these recipes so much, that’s the only reason I’m begging for some UI changes!

by Yearwoodj

NYTCooking has one shortcoming: it lists ingredients in one pane, then it lists directions in another. “Add the salt and baking powder” means flipping back to the ingredients pane to see measurements. For those cooks who pre-measure all their ingredients then line them up on the counter waiting to deploy them, that’s great. Nothing in my life is that planned.

Regardless, when my significant other got sick, I discovered that NYTCooking helped me keep both of us alive with excellent, tasty food, brilliant how-to videos, and an awesome depth of recipe types and cuisines. Something like 15,000 recipes, searchable and categorized, much larger and more efficient than any cookbook. The handy shopping list feature lets me download the ingredients to my phone to take to the grocery store, giving me more time to care for our house, our pets, and her.

I use NYTCooking every day. As her health declines, my other half says she just wants plain, no fuss food, then gladly accepts the NYT grilled cheese and tomato soup, or Sifton’s smash burger. It doesn’t take hours of preparing a Julia Child-worthy meal in order to find little gems in NYTCooking that are simple and delicious. And quick.

NYTCooking has restored a great bit of my quality of life. I love it, and I love the NYT for providing it. It’s really a life saver in the sense that life is more than continuing to breathe and pump blood. For that, we have doctors. For life, we have the NYT.

by Anon789456

I love NYT's recipes, but because the newest NYT app is so bad (it won't even work on my 2012 iPad mini) I am considering cancelling my subscription. The NYT cooking app is all that is keeping me subscribed as a paying customer. However, if I am going to pay for this, here are two things that you should do to make NYTCooking better:
1) let me choose multiple categories when I am filing a recipe. Right now, I have to click on organize recipes once for every category that I file some thing on. This is a waste of my time.
2) let me search by multiple ingredients at once to find recipes that call for thing s I have "on hand". I can approximate this type of search with the regular search function, but it would be nice to have a designated "search for items on-hand" so that when I search for zucchini I also get summer squash results.

by Ccarter756

NYTCooking is one of the few I use daily. The meal planning suggestions have helped me avoid that 4:30 pm panic about what to fix for dinner many times. I don't cook everything in Sam Sifton's suggestions every week, but I usually find at least one or two recipes to add to my own ideas for weekly meal planning. The recipes are as diverse as New York itself, ranging from familiar comfort foods to elegant classic French cuisine, to more exotic Middle Eastern, Asian and African dishes, which are familiar comfort foods in other places. The dessert recipes are amazing!

Recipes are clear and easy to follow. It is a great help to be able to pull up a recipe on my tablet, and to be able to read and follow it without wasteful printing. Plus, the printing function works well, for those who would rather spill on paper than on delicate electronics.

The recipe ratings and reviews can be sorted by most helpful. Favorite recipes can be saved and organized, which is good, because my list of favorites is becoming unwieldy.

Others have mentioned price of NYTCooking . Considering the hundreds of dollars I would otherwise spend on cookbooks from these authors, it is a real bargain. Add in the recipe search functions, and the fact that it takes up no more room in my overstuffed bookcases, and it quickly becomes indispensable.

by Coqui Denise

I was the wife and mother who hated cooking. Ten years into marriage and motherhood I discovered this subscription through the NYT. I started by making some breads, began watching the videos, reading tips, took on sheet pan meals, and now make all sorts of more complex meals because of the confidence I have built through how friendly NYTCooking is and how delicious these meals are. NYTCooking has changed my life and I’m now a queen of meals in our house. My kids help me and pick out their favorite dishes and often prefer to eat in than eat out. And I never feel stressed anymore when making homemade dinners. I even have the confidence and know how to put ingredients together without finding specific recipes. We also use NYTCooking to plan all our holiday get together and party meals. All thanks to this NYT cooking subscription!

by Lizabetharmstrong

I love NYTCooking--it's so convenient to have so many recipes (and ideas) so readily available. The feedback and conversation about almost every recipe is tremendously helpful--and having access to these recipes--including some that I've saved to my recipe box from elsewhere--on my phone is incredibly useful--easier than hauling the laptop around (do I really want that in my kitchen anyway?) and beats printing out endless pieces of paper. My only regret is that the columns that come with the recipes aren't up here too--but I'm realistic enough to believe that might be impractical in this space.
I'm sorry there are folks who are upset about having to pay a bit--quality journalism isn't free. I've subscribed to the Times online for years--it's not that expensive AND you get the newspaper as well as this treasure trove of cooking ideas.

by You Can Do Better NYT Cooking

I’ve been using NYTCooking from the very beginning, saving my favorite recipes and using them frequently. Recently I went to my saved recipe box and noticed that over half the recipes were gone, and all of those that I had flagged as “cooked” were no longer there. I sent a note to technical service immediately and still days later haven’t received any assistance. This is completely unacceptable. This is not a free App, this service is overpriced to begin with, and it is absolutely unacceptable for dozens and dozens of saved recipes to completely disappear with no record and no recourse. No different than if I buy a cookbook and the publishers come into my house and remove it. So beware if you are thinking of paying for NYTCooking. You may be better off looking elsewhere.

by Mcb6136

I havnt always been a cook. Or even a baker, although I took to that younger. I spent my first 15 years doing some baking. I used to love decorating cakes. Then I went to college and then life went on. And I never really baked again, and certainly never bothered to learn to cook well.

Fast forward a few decades and I’ve taught myself to cook. Really cook. Well. People want an invitation to my house for dinner. They love it when I stop by with some extra couscous salad or leftovers from a holiday meal. I’m not bragging, im sharing my total shock that this has come to pass.

Many of the recipes I’ve made have come from the NYT food section. I can’t wait for Wed to see what I may be making Thur. Velvet fish? Yum. Mushroom appetizers? I’m in (and I don’t really like mushrooms). And more.

I’ve also picked up baking again. Made the lemon coconut cake form this weeks paper. Fantastic!!

NYTCooking allows me to save and comment on adjustments I’ve made - which I do. Velvet fish sauce needs to be 1.5 the recipe. And needs more heat. The butternut squash “florets” need more purée and a little less sugar. Etc.

But I find many of my goto recipes come from the NYT. And of course, also ideas on which cookbooks to invest in.