Why You Should Be Using Your Phone's Contacts to Save Recipes

Smartphones do a lot to make cooking easier. Instead of scouring your cookbooks for a specific dinner recipe, or guesstimating the oil-to-vinegar ratio of a perfect vinaigrette, you can look up the information in seconds without leaving your kitchen. But things become a lot less convenient if you have to wash your hands every time you want to use your touchscreen. As The Kitchn reports, there is a way to use Siri to pull up recipes hands-free—and it involves an app you already have on your iPhone.

Food writer Adam Erace recently revealed his trick for organizing recipes in a tweet. Instead of using a dedicated app like Pinterest, Erace creates new contacts in his phone for his most-used recipes. The title of the recipe is saved as the contact name, and details like ingredients, measurements, and ratios go under the contact notes.

It may seem disorganized to save your favorite oatmeal cookie recipe next to your best friend's phone number, but the method makes sense. Every recipe you file in your contacts is sorted alphabetically and easily searchable. But the biggest benefit is that they're accessible through Siri. If your iPhone's hands-free voice activation is enabled, you can activate the virtual assistant without touching the home button. Just say "Hey Siri, show contact meatball" and it will pull up the recipe on your phone while you're handling the ingredients. Erace uses it for basic cooking information like grain-to-liquid ratios, but any recipe that's in your rotation can work.

Hacking your contacts list to make your next meal is one simple way to use technology in the kitchen. Here are some more examples of the ways tech can make cooking easier.