What's the best program for cooking and recipe management?

[mouser]

Any ideas what the best program is to manage recipes, and search.  Maybe one that has a lot of recipes already or maybe one with none, not sure what i'd like best.

[zridling]

TopTen Reviews' Cookbook & Recipe Software Review might get you started. Meanwhile, there are tons of recipe sites online when you need to eat. A book that helped me — as a man who just wants good food over a life in the kitchen — is Leisureguy's Cooking Compendium ebook.

[J-Mac]

Not sure about recipes, mouser, but I am still looking for a good shopping list.  I used HandyShopper on a PPC for a long while and could transfer that to PC. But they never did get out a decent PC version on its own!

HandyShopper had databases for Home Depot, most drug store chains, grocery markets, etc., etc. Each item had a place for as much or little detail as you desired. Indispensable. But any I find online for the PC are not much more than text lists. 

Jim

[nosh]

A relatively unexplored category!  I'm thinking a must-have feature for a software like this would be to connect to an online repository and contribute or download specific recipes to the local database with ability to modify it further.

I remember Barback from way back - it was (is) this humongous database of drinks.

[muntealb]

A software of this kind is Yiola ( http://www.koma-code.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=6 ) , which is free. Does not have included recipes, but they can be easily added and managed.

[Dormouse]

I'm surprised 'no-one' has recommended SQLnotes for this yet. 

[mouser]

hahahahaahahahaa

[Nod5]

A relatively unexplored category!  I'm thinking a must-have feature for a software like this would be to connect to an online repository and contribute or download specific recipes to the local database with ability to modify it further.

That would be incredibly useful! There are so many great foodblogs out there but no really easy way to do advanced searches across many of them. I get hungry just by thinking about how much more good food I could've eaten with such a tool at hand! 

[edbro]

I use BigOven and really like it. http://www.bigoven.com

I have also heard good things about the Living Cookbook.

[johnfdeluca]

I've used Living Cookbook.  It's fantastic and has an active support forum.  For me, it was overkill though.  I'ved tried many and after trying several, I use the completely unsupported and not free Arca Cooking Action2005 http://arcasoft.com/.  I really tried not to use it because it was one that never responded to an email asking for assistance on a bug.  It appears to have no active development but I chose to spend $30 on this vs. the vastly powerful living cookbook becuase of it's simplicity.  It does exactly what I need and is very easy to use.

Specifically, it allows me to create ingredients as part of a recipe and define those ingredients into categories.  I set the categories up to match aisles in my supermarket.  I can then plan meals with recipes and generate a shopping list by aisle which makes shopping easier and faster.  It's easy to search for ingredients quickly (something that was complex in LivingCookbook as it required you to set up a search).  Again....living cookbook has EVERYTHING you'll likely ever need in a cookbook/shopping list generator but it's complexity was too much for me.

[iphigenie]

A relatively unexplored category!  I'm thinking a must-have feature for a software like this would be to connect to an online repository and contribute or download specific recipes to the local database with ability to modify it further.

That would be incredibly useful! There are so many great foodblogs out there but no really easy way to do advanced searches across many of them. I get hungry just by thinking about how much more good food I could've eaten with such a tool at hand! 

It is one of my projects that always gets put off to do a website app which is a recipe organiser, sharing etc.

The bit I had started on was a recipe "scanner" that would try to recognise patterns. This is so a recipe could then be automatically put in a structure when being stored, and then it can be displayed in a choice of languages or styles. This is all I ever started but maybe, one day...

[app103]

There is no standard 'recipe format' that could be compatible with all software. I wish there was. Then we could all swap recipe files and they could work in anything written to use it. It would also make it easier to import recipes from websites if they all followed some sort of standard.

Like there is a standard for the xml PAD files, there should be a standard for xml recipe files. I don't know why there isn't already.

The whole idea of being able to create a recipe database on my home pc, consisting of the 20 years of creations I have concocted, really appeals to me. It would make having that pc in my kitchen make more sense.

This is something I have given a lot of thought to, and I do plan on writing my own software to do it at some point in the very distant future.

There are certain features I feel an application MUST have, if it is going to be something I will be happy with, long term.

• must be able to import/export recipes in some sort of agreed upon standard format
• must be easy to adjust the yield
• must be easy to convert between metric & imperial measurements
• must include a menu planner
• must include a shopping list builder
• must be searchable by ingredient/type, capable of handling multiple search terms, and displaying the results in a ranked list (such as "cookies cocoa shortening" results showing all cookie recipes containing both ingredients as ranked higher than cake with the 2 ingredients, or cookies with only 1 of the ingredients)
• must include an ingredient substitution database (if you don't have a cup of buttermilk, there should be a way to select an alternative)

These are just off the top of my head, but I wouldn't really want to create anything that didn't have those features, nor would I ever want to spend money on another recipe application that didn't have them.

[KenR]

My wife has used Masterpiece for a long time. It has been revised numerous times and is quite polished. To name just a few features: it will make shopping lists, you can print the instructions for a recipe to cook from, and you can cook things in the recipe database it includes or add your own recipes. The cost is very reasonable and you can usually buy it off the shelf for under $20 NOT on sale.

Ken

[johnfdeluca]

I did a mini-review of CookingAction over in the minireview section http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=11902.msg97240

[dspelley]

For me it's BigOven http://www.bigoven.com/. Gives access to a large online database of recipe's searchable by cuisine, main ingredient, etc. New recipe's are always being added and rated by an active user group.

Can import recipes from several of the standard recipe formats (MealMaster, MasterCook, etc).

Easy menu planning by dragging recipies onto built-in calendar. Drag recipes onto shopping list.

Enter a list of a few leftover foods and it can find recipes you can make from those items.

Starter version is about $10. Full version is about $30.