App-setisers: Platter

There are hundreds of dedicated food apps out there now, where you can show off your latest creation, get tips on how to eat healthy and have access to thousands of recipes from top chefs who’ll take you step by step through their most intricate creations. But are they any good? Will they ever replace your beloved, well thumbed and grease smeared cookbooks? Each week we are going to bring you our app-setisers; a look at the food apps we think will make you hungry.

Everyone is currently obsessed with photographing their food, perhaps to remember dishes you’ve eaten and memorable meals out, but more likely to show off what a good cook you are! We’re just as guilty; we can’t resist whipping out our I phones and getting a snap so we can tell all you guys what we’re eating.

Platter is a brand new social app where you can share pictures of what you’re cooking and eating, see what other people are making and get inspiration for future meals. It’s ridiculously simple to use, snap your food, give it a title and tag the main ingredients - dishes can then be liked and commented on.

Rather than just seeing a stream of envious food porn, the app is centred on the idea of ingredients and this is where you can really see some use in it. We love looking at tasty food as much as the next greedy person, but often it doesn’t make it any easier to choose what we want when browsing the supermarket after work.

Using the Cupboard icon you can enter items you regularly have in your kitchen and a stream of results will come up using those ingredients. So when we entered that we’ve often got some chicken, tomatoes, peppers and eggs knocking about we got these lovely results.

The Feeds icon lets you browse recently uploaded pictures from people you follow (easy to connect with your Facebook and Twitter), latest and starred. We particularly loved this Lemongrass steak & vegetable stir fry. 

The layout is pretty standard but that also means it's really easy to use and the simple design and icons mean the dishes appear even more eye catching when absent-mindedly browsing. We particularly like the green dots for likes, an effective way of instantly seeing how popular a dish is. 

For anyone who loves Pinterest or Instagram, this app should be well up your street. As with most new apps there are a few glitches, and it can take a while for pictures and profiles to update but these are currently being worked on. It already seems to have a dedicated set of foodie users and we’ve even got our own loveyourlarder profile you can follow. We don't need any excuses to take more food snaps. 

You can see the Top 100 Dishes on their website here and download the app for free for either iphone or android.