Your Mac in Your Kitchen: A Review of MacGourmet 2.3.5

Product Category: Mac Desktop Recipe Application
Developer: Advenio, LLC
Where to Buy: Deluxe at Amazon.com [AFFILIATE] or Download version at Advenio, LLC
Price: $47.99 for Deluxe at Amazon, $24.99 for download edition
System Requirements / Specifications: OS X, PPC or Intel Mac.  There are two versions. Deluxe is distributed by Mariner Software and includes all 3 plug-ins. The download version has no plugins and each plugin must be purchased separately for $11.95 each. Requires 17 megabytes of disk space for install and space for the recipe database.

Pros:

• Intuitive and easy to use;
• Smart Recipe Lists;
• Has a Plug-in Architecture.

Cons:

• Made for small databases;
• No direct iPhone/iPod Touch syncing.

Summary:
MacGourmet is great software for storing and managing recipes. It's fast and intuitive to use, and the Smart Recipe feature is as powerful as iTunes smart playlist feature.

Features

Figure 1:  A screenshot of MacGourmet showing all the search options.

I downloaded a demo copy of MacGourmet after viewing a video of the program in action at the MacGourmet Website. I purchased it two days later, along with the nutrition plug-in. The feature that sold me was the ingredient parsing. When you create a new recipe, you can drag an ingredient list from a web page or text file onto the ingredients list in MacGourmet and it automatically fills out the ingredient list correctly, separating out quantity, measurement and ingredient. That seemed a bit like magic to me, and I've used the program ever since.

The program sports a small, but poweful feature set, including shopping lists, smart and user recipe lists (like playlists in iTunes), and importing from various recipe formats. It can import recipes in Mastercook (Mac and PC), Meal Master, Cook'N, RecipeML, and Yum XML. It's also incredibly easy to add recipes from web sites using drag and drop. Recipes can be tagged and categorized to your heart's content, making it easy to find exactly what you're looking for in a larger database.

Recipe Lists and Shopping Lists

Figure 2: The Smart Recipe List feature.

There are two kinds of recipe lists: User lists and smart lists. User lists are lists you create by dragging recipes into a list. For example, you could create a list for a specific holiday (such as Thanksgiving) and drag recipes that you plan on making for that holiday into the list.

The Smart Recipe lists are very powerful. You can create lists that meet any or all of the criteria that MacGourmet can sort on, including keywords, ingredients, difficulty, flags, etc. I used it to create a list of meals made with chicken, as I've been eating too much red meat. This made finding healthier recipes quick and easy. Since you can search on keyword, you can tag recipes and create playlists that meet criteria you set. This makes it easy to create personalized recipe lists.

Shopping lists are just as easy to create. You can highlight a group of recipes and create a shopping list from them. There's also drag and drop shopping lists. The shopping lists can be exported into iPod and PDA compatible formats to carry with you, or plain text files for printing out.

Nutrition Plug-in

Figure 3:  The Nutrition Information tab.

The Nutrition Plug-in allows you to calculate the approximate nutritional value of any meal in your database. The interface, like all things in MacGourmet, is drag and drop. You have to save your recipe before you can calculate the nutrition. After you save, you open the recipe and then go to the Nutrition tab. The program will attempt to match the ingredient list against it's database. If it can't match something, you just bring up the Nutrition Database and find the ingredient in its list, then drag it from the nutrition database on top of the ingredient that didn't match. You now have a match.

I checked the plug-ins calculations against recipes with known nutritional information. It was mostly accurate. I noticed a five percent deviation in results, in either direction, though it tended to over calculate rather than under calculate. So, for example, if a recipe has 200 calories per serving, it might show up as 190 calories or 210. This is close enough for most people's use.

Other Features and Plug-ins

Figure 4: MacGourmet's Chef View.

There are two additional plug-ins that I did not purchase. I did run the demo versions (which are fully featured.) The Mealplan plug-in allows you to create menus, and the Cookbook plug-in adds the ability to create PDF cookbooks. Both were as functional and easy to use as MacGourmet itself. In the MacGourmet test kitchen (their beta test site), there is an Amazon.com shopping plug-in. I did not test this plug-in. MacGourmet supports Wine and chef notes. There's also a chef view that displays the recipe in large type so if you have a Mac in your kitchen, it's easier to see the recipe you're working with. The search feature is powerful and as easy to use as the one in iTunes.

The program is made for small databases (about 15,000 or so recipes), which should be enough for most home users. Over that amount, the program gets slower. About the only feature I'd like to see added is the ability to directly sync recipes and shopping lists with the iPhone. As it is, I copy shopping lists over to a to-do list app on my iPhone manually, and I email myself text copies of recipes to carry with me on the iPhone

Conclusion
MacGourmet is good at what it does. If you need a way to store, organize and search recipes, this program is incredibly handy. It's not the most powerful recipe program available, but it's certainly one of the easiest. This program is intuitive and powerful enough for most home users. The lack of iPhone/iPod Touch sync is a minor gripe, and in no way detracts from the usefulness of MacGourmet.

Joe Johaneman is a programmer and web designer in Honesdale, PA. He is also an amateur photographer and graphic designer.