Our occasionally culinary cousins over at Lifehacker may have jumped the gun on Gastronomodo Taste Test by a few weeks, but I’ll let this one slide, because it’s helpful: Here are five good ways to manage your recipes.
Lifehacker’s got all the details, but here’s the gist:
• Allrecipes.com stores and organises your recipes IN THE CLOUD, to put it sensationally, or on their servers, to put it reasonably. It’s an informational site first and foremost, but it seems to handle recipe management pretty well too. It’s free, or $US17.50 for a full membership.
• SousChef is a bit like Allrecipes, except it’s got a fancy-pants Mac app, and a cool enlarged-interface option so you can read recipes from afar, keeping your laptop out of harm’s way. It’ll set you back $US30.
• Evernote is a amazing all-purpose notetaking/organisational system that just happens to be pretty great at dealing with The Victuals. Basic version is free and sufficiently food-capable, while the full licence is $US45 a year, with apps for Mac, Windows and iPhone.
• Big Oven looks a lot like SousChef, except it works on Windows, has a highly functional website, not to mention an iPhone companion app. It’s $US30.
• And, if course, paper! It’s great if you’re worried about ruining your laptop with an errant sauce splatter, or if you need to round out a blog listicle with something cute. Lifehacker’s sentimental readers overwhelmingly favour this one, and to be fair, it’s probably the most practical. But, you know, technology!
Taste Test is our week-long tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.
Aaron Podmore
August 27, 2009 at 1:59 PM
I use Microsoft Office 2007 OneNote. It’s reasonably easy to categorise things in terms of books/tabs/pages, insert hyperlinks to other pages (i.e. to a pastry recipe from a pie recipe), and use tags, search, etc.
Recently I’ve even been scanning cookbooks and newspaper clippings in directly, and using the optical character recognition to let me search for keywords without having to re-type recipes.
Copying recipes from websites is easy too, with the default setting to insert “copied from http://…“, allowing the original to be located easily.
Prior to using OneNote, I just typed recipes into Gmail and sent them to friends. That way, they got a copy, and I could log in to my inbox from a friend’s house and have all the benefits of ‘cloud’ access.
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