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Remember those roasted Brussels sprouts you made last year for the holidays? The whole family loved them—even Uncle Enzo, who normally turns green whenever forced to eat something of that color. Your family now thinks you’re a kitchen wizard and wants you to repeat your culinary feat this weekend, but you can’t seem to find the recipe. You remember discovering it online last year, after having had one eggnog too many, but you can’t remember where. The copy you printed out has long since made its way into a recycling bin, and when you type “Roasted Brussels Sprouts” into Google, you get thousands of listings. If you can find that recipe again, you must remember to save it. But how?
When you locate that perfect ingredient combination for pumpkin pie filling or the ideal technique for roasting Cornish game hens, the Web doesn’t give you many options for holding on to it. You can bookmark a recipe that has a dedicated URL, you can cut and paste a recipe into an e-mail or document, or you can hit the ‘print’ button, but these are pretty clunky ways to store ideas you want for quick reference. Many big recipe sites now have digital recipe boxes behind their log-in screens, but these are of limited use as well. Maintaining dozens of different accounts with food sites is not only a pain; by distributing my recipes all over the Internet, I can’t browse, sort, or search them as a whole.
This year, I decided to build a digital recipe library, using what tools were available on the Web and through various app stores. It turns out there are plenty of recipe-aggregation tools out there, but I wound up focusing on three: Paprika’s Mac and iPad apps, MacGourmet’s Mac App, and KeepRecipes’s Web portal. I discovered they’re all great services for saving and cataloging specific types of recipe. They share a single, huge limitation.
KeepRecipes is both a recipe library and a community cooking portal. You can enter your own creations or cut and paste recipes manually into its fields, but the really handy tool is a button you install in the bookmarks bar of your browser. If you find a recipe you want to save for a later date, you hit the button—and up pops a recipe window with the ingredients, directions, notes, and pictures pre-entered—theoretically, at least—into the appropriate fields. You tap the save button and the recipe will forever be stored in your digital online library.
Paprika and MacGourmet perform similar types of website scraping, but do it within embedded browsers. When you surf to a recipe page through the apps and decide to press the save button, each generates digital recipe cards with the relevant fields for ingredients, their individual measurements, directions, notes, and even dietary information and photos. Both apps go beyond just storing recipes, though: You can create shopping lists with one click on a recipe and even generate weekly meal planners. Paprika and MacGourmet both have iPad and iPhone apps as well, allowing you to sync shopping lists and recipes between devices. That’s quite handy if you don’t know what you want to cook before you go to the store, or if you happen upon some tremendous deal on lamb chops and change plans on the fly.
These are all great apps, although each performs some functions better than others. If I wanted to write my own digital cookbook, using my recipes (which are hand-scrawled in a dog-eared notebook), I’d go with MacGourmet. It allows you to enter a tremendous level of detail for each recipe, all in relevant, searchable fields. The interface is a bit clunky, though, compared to Paprika’s streamlined look. Paprika also seemed to have the better scraping algorithms, more reliably putting data in the right boxes, and it was able to grab a lot of recipes MacGourmet couldn’t. It also generated far-more-useful shopping lists, offering simple lists of ingredients and quantities you can check off your iPad with a finger flick.
