With mobile technology moving to the forefront of our lives, we take a look at the present and potential future of apps in the kitchen and for the modern chef.

With innovators and inventors finding new and exciting ways to use current and future technology, every sector is evolving. Central to this are apps, which are highly accessible and very variable, especially to the kitchen.

While there is no substitute for scales and learned knowledge, the following food apps are all designed to make life in and out of the professional kitchen a lot easier, and some are even prototypes alluding to the future of apps in cooking.

   1)      Locavore

A great app for sourcing local produce. If you work in an establishment that is keen to get more green and support local farmers and grocers, Locavore allows you to search for in-season, local food using your phone’s GPS location and view local farmers’ profile pages. You can also view recipes for in-season items.

   2)      Big Oven

Big Oven is a bit like the Wikipedia of recipe books. Containing over 350,000 recipes, this social network allows you to submit and browse other people’s recipes, create shopping lists and plan menus. Upgrading to pro membership gives you nutritional insight and allows you to create custom folders brimming with diet-optimised recipes.

   3)      Escoffier Cook’s Companion

Contains pretty much everything you would need to get by in a busy kitchen or at home. Complete with an in-depth measurement converter, simultaneous-use kitchen timer, a rare ingredients list and an equipment list that finally tells you what that knife you have no idea what is for… is for. For the less versed, there is also a huge cooking glossary. Use with a protective cover is, of course, advised.

   4)      Gojee

This is for the chef or home cook that likes a bit of a challenge. It’s late, and you’ve not got a lot in. You’re determined not to get a takeaway, and you’re not eating cereal over the sink again. You check your fridge and pantry, head over to the Gojee app and it will scavenge recipes from all over the web for you to cook. If you want a challenge, put some obscure ingredients into Gojee and see what it returns.

   5)      Seafood Watch App

A simple way of clueing up on what’s going down in the fishing industry. If you’re into promoting your restaurant as a place to eat sustainably-sourced food, this is an app you need - it allows you to get free, regularly updated seafood recommendations and updates on their availability and sustainability, where you can get seafood locally and where other sustainably eateries are.

   6)      Gravity

There are many digital scales apps available, but most are purely for entertainment and have no real practical use in cooking. Gravity, however, was the outlier. Was, because the iTunes store rejected it, believing it to be either a prank, or just completely non-viable. It’s actually a really smart piece of tech.

The iPhone 6 series has a feature called 3D Touch, which inventor Chase McBride saw potential for weighing scales in. He recognised the limitations in measuring, as the feature has a custom force scale (with 1.00 being average) which would need to be converted into a unit of measure. Using a spoon to simulate the touch of a finger, they calibrated the app using known units of measure, such as coins, which allowed them to create a linear correlation between grams and Apple Force Units, thus enabling weighing up to 385g.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be.