Latest culinary software turns cooking into a cakewalk
The personal computer can help out in the kitchen, even if you don’t keep your PC on the countertop.
Cooking enthusiasts employ personal computers for any number of kitchen-related tasks, from sharing recipes to planning weekly menus. As specialized cooking and recipe software proliferates, cooks have newfangled ways to organize the gastronomic advice and information they accumulate.
With names such as Cookbook Wizard and Living Cookbook, these programs provide a handy, centralized way to store recipes, shopping lists, cooking terms and even nutritional data. Just consider the capabilities of “Cook’n,” one of the most popular of the cooking programs.
Aside from allowing you to enter and store recipes, “Cook’n” helps you to automate a number of tasks:
• If you want to serve seven people, rather than four, you can simply change the number of servings, and the quantities of all of your ingredients, from anise to yams, will be recalculated for you.
• You can analyze the nutritional value of recipes, based on the labels from 10,000 food products.
• You can download recipes to a hand-held computer to take to the grocery store.
Perhaps the standout feature, available in all of the top-notch cooking programs, is the ability to create weekly menus and generate shopping lists from those menus.
To do this in “Cook’n,” you drag recipes from a recipe list to a day of the week. The program then combines the ingredients from those recipes into a single shopping list, bringing together, for instance, the three tablespoons of tomato paste for the chili-rubbed chicken and the quarter-cup required for the oxtail stew. (You still need to remember how many cans of tomato paste you’ve got in the pantry.)
Among the most full-featured of recipe management programs is “Living Cookbook.” The program allows you to add photographs to recipes, enter recipe reviews and ratings, calculate recipe costs, share menus with other users and e-mail recipes.
Cooking software often includes several hundred recipes, as well as other resources cooks will find handy, including reference materials about cooking techniques, glossaries of cooking terms, details on spices and video demonstrations.
For those seeking to share their recipes with people other than family, friends and online acquaintances, the programs sometimes offer the ability to create Web pages from recipes or even publish cookbooks in Microsoft Word format.
Cooking, of course, doesn’t happen in front of the computer. Even computer-crazed cooks are unlikely to want to fool with a PC with flour-covered hands. With that in mind, these programs typically offer a variety of printing options. These even include the ability to print recipes on 3-by-5-inch cards, for those cooks unwilling to forgo their trusty card files.
Aside from the software already mentioned, other popular options for Windows PCs, generally available for $30 or less, include “AccuChef,” “Cooken,” “Home Cookin,” “MasterCook,” “Now You’re Cooking,” “ProChef” and “Recipe Organizer Deluxe.” Programs available in both Macintosh and Windows versions include “Computer Cuisine Deluxe” and “CookWare Deluxe.”