I handle the cooking duties in my household, and that's not a complaint. After a day of staring at smartphone specs and camera comparisons, I like turning my attention to tablespoons and braises.
And while I like serving up reliable favorites at meal time, part of the joy of cooking for me involves discovering new recipes.
I an now turning to a seemingly unlikely source for inspiration. As part of the iOS 18.4 update that came out last month, Apple expanded its News Plus subscription service to include a Food section that now offers recipes, alongside food-relevant articles on restaurants, diet and kitchen tools.
A handful of recipes are visible to anyone accessing the News app on their iPhone, but to get the full array of recipes, you need to subscribe to Apple News Plus, with a subscription also granting you access to paywalled newspaper and magazine articles, Apple's growing array of games and other add-ons that aren't part of the regular News app.
There's no specific number given for the total amount of recipes offered. In announcing the launch of the Food section, Apple placed the number in the thousands, and having poked around the app, I'm willing to buy that estimate
I've noticed recipes sourced to publications such as Southern Living, Chatelaine, Simply Recipes, Eating Well, Country Living, Food & Wine and Serious Eats, and presumably, the volume will expand as those publications push out more content to the Food section in Apple News Plus.
I've spent the past week familiarizing myself with the additions to Apple News Plus from iOS 18.4. Here's what you can expect from the Food section in Apple News and whether it helps to justify the $12.99 monthly cost of subscribing to the News Plus service.
Apple News Plus Food — where to find it
You can scroll down in either the News or News Plus tabs to stumble across Food-related articles as part of your regular browsing. But the quickest route to the new section is to select the Following tab, and tap on the Food option from the menu that appears.
In Apple News Plus Food, you'll find a featured recipe — one that's been selected by Apple's editorial team from the database of recipes contained in the app. Since this happens to be Easter week, there's been an emphasis on menu items for an Easter meal, like ham, frittatas and various pastries that wouldn't be out of place at a brunch.
Scroll down from the Featured Recipe, and there are even more articles from the publications that have signed up with Apple News Plus.
But it's the recipe database where you'll find the true value in Apple News Plus Food. Tap on Recipe Catalog at the top of the main screen, and you've got quick access to not just the full complement of recipes, but a search tool that can filter things down to exactly what you're looking for.
There's a search field at the top of the screen, but you can also tap icons with titles like "Dinner," "Vegetarian" and "<30 Min" to home in on a very specific type of dish. Additional filters are available if you use the search field. I can type in "lamb" as an example, and then tap the filter button in the upper right corner to select specific dish types, dietary preferences and cooking methods.
The Food section logs your recent searches for easy reference later on. You can also save recipes that you like or want to try — those will be stashed under a Saved Recipes header available from main News Plus Food screen.
I found the search features pretty robust, but I wish you could fine-tune things a little bit more than the filters allow.
I'm thinking of a scenario where I have a couple of specific items in my refrigerator or pantry that are rapidly approaching a "use or lose it" status of freshness. I'd like to be able to enter in all those ingredients and see if there's any recipe in the News Plus Food database that lets me use all or even most of them.
Alas, searches in Food work best with one particular item. Sometimes, you get results when you type in two complementary ingredients like "pork" and "apples." But a search of mine that used kale, apple and dates turned up nothing.
Either none of Apple's food sources has ever known the joy of a good kale salad with apples and dates, or the use of multiple ingredients flummoxed the search tool.
Cooking with Apple News Plus
The new Food section in Apple News doesn't stop with offering up recipes, though. It wants to be your cooking companion as well.
Each recipe in the app contains a list of ingredients and the steps for preparing a dish. There's also a link to any supporting article, just in case you want to read the origin story of that toad in the hole recipe you're about to try and replicate.
But there's a Cook button for each recipe, too, and that's where the magic happens. Tapping Cook takes the cooking steps of that particular recipe and displays them in a larger font, allowing you to prop up your phone near your prep away so that you can refer to each step as you cook.
The list of instructions is scrollable, so you just swipe down as you go through each part of the recipe. I have a slight issue with this. as I wish that part of the app could be voice controlled.
That way, i could still navigate through the steps of a recipe without having to touch the screen of my phone, when my hands may have been handling raw chicken or jalapenos or lord knows what substance that may not react well with an iPhone display.
But the cooking steps view has a few hidden features that should come in handy when you're preparing a dish. Cook times are highlighted and marked with a clock icon — tap the time and you can start a time directly from within the News app.
Likewise, ingredients appear highlighted as well. Tap one of those and you'll see the exact amount you're supposed to be using, just in case you can't remember whether it was one teaspoon of paprika or two that you're supposed to add to a dish.
The Cook view also offers an Ingredients tab next to the Directions tab that has a the complete list of things you'll need to make a dish. Tap those, and they'll fade out, which is a helpful way of knowing which ingredient you've used and which one you still might have to grab from the pantry.
Is Food worth an Apple News Plus subscription?
Overall, I think the Food section is a great addition to Apple's News app. Back when I was teaching myself to cook, I looked forward to the weekly food section in my local newspaper — kids, ask your parents — which would bring a whole host of new recipes for me to try. The new offering in the News Plus service recreates that for a digital age.
On its own, though, Food's collection of recipes probably doesn't offer enough on its own to justify a $12,99 recurring expense. Yes, there are a lot of recipes and they're presented in an engaging way. But that's a lot to pay when there are so many other online sources offering recipe ideas, even if they are of admittedly varying quality.
The thing is, though, you're not just paying $12,99 for the Food component alone. That feature is baked into the rest of the Apple News Plus offerings, which includes exclusive games and access to lots of different publications.
Food is a welcome addition to that, and if you're the sort of person who gets excited about discovering new recipes while also reaping the other benefits of an Apple News Plus subscription, it's worth checking out.
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