Monday, November 16, 2015

[Question] Cookbook apps for organizing recipes (Windows PC)?

I recently upgraded to Windows 10 and was pleasantly surprised with the food and dining app's ability to store recipes. I attempted to open the app yesterday and was met with a notification the app is no longer supported and to visit the app store to find another program.

Barring my annoyance as such, I went to look for another, but I'm not thrilled with any of the options. To be clear, I'm looking for an app designed for Windows PC (so no Apple programs, or mobile/tablet apps) that I can input and store my own recipes in. I don't want an app for simply browsing and favoriting recipes from around the top recipe sites on the web - I want something that can take the place of my handwritten recipes, the recipes emailed to me from my mother, and ones that I can add new recipes to from online as I find them.

So far, I have found 4.

  1. The official windows cookbook app, which is free, but requires in-app purchases to make it useful. The free version is limited to 20 recipes (5 of which are taken up by recipes the app provides). The additional "baking" section for the recipes - such as what temperature to preheat your oven to - require a purchase to unlock. It's the best app I've found so far, but I don't want to pay $8 to store more recipes, $4 to be able to use it for my baking recipes, $4 for the function to add photos to your recipes, etc. etc. etc.

  2. Your Cookbook is a free app, allowing you to manually insert recipes. It's ad-revenue driven and you pay to upgrade to the ad-free version. The design is clunky (and ugly), and inputting my recipes took more time on this app than any other.

  3. Kitchen Tools is a nice, minimalistic app. Free - it's lacking in most of the additional frills all the other apps come with - no photos, no search features for finding recipes, and no importing recipes from online sources. Worst part is, you can't resize the app - resulting in an ingredients list where "800g butternut pumpkin puree" takes up three lines and the ingredients list begins to look like a hot mess. It's pretty frustrating and leads to a lot of scrolling up and down.

  4. I can't recall the name of the last one, but the app required a comprehensive ingredients list, which was easy enough to add to. However, the "list" that comes pre-loaded came with things such as fancy cheeses I've never heard of, but lacked staples such as buttermilk, vanilla beans, egg yolks, brown sugar, or chicken thigh cutlets (vanilla sugar and extract, whole eggs, granulated white sugar and chicken breasts/tenders were included, though). In order to add an ingredient, you need to type in what you want, classify what type of food it was, what the standard unit of measure for the ingredient was (for example butternut pumpkin -> vegetable -> grams), and let the app run a quick search online for nutrition. For one random ingredient, this would be no issue. But for half of the ingredients for a simple pumpkin pie is ridiculous, and a waste of my time.

Thoughts?



bon appetit

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