Review: you’ll be cookin’ with SousChef

Posted by Don Foy Dec 1, 2008 at 2:05pm

So, tired of turkey, yet? Boy, do I have a treat for you. I’ve been looking for a good program to collect up all of my recipes in one place. I’ve tried a bunch of free, or nearly free, programs. I’ve even considered building my own Bento database of recipes.

All that changed with SousChef. This little, US$0 program does a lot of stuff. Probably too much stuff. It brings cooking to “The Cloud,” allowing you to share your recipes with the world and use other folks’ recipes. You can hide recipes from everyone else if you choose. You can set up substitutions in addition to a plethora of pre-entered substitutions. You can import recipes you’ve found on the Web. You can make entries on your blog from the program. You can change the yield of any recipe. And all of that, and much more, is easy to do with SousChef.

But there are three features that set this program apart from anything else I have used for recipe management.

First, recipe import. If you can put it in your clipboard, SousChef can import it. Usually, if you want to input a recipe, you use your keyboard and hope you got it right. SousChef, with a little help from you, will set up the list of ingredients and instructions and literally take seconds to import the recipe. It saves a ton of time. This feature is not as easy as it ought to be, but this is a 1.0 version, meaning it should improve over time.

Second, cook with your computer. Get tired of walking back and forth from where you’re cooking to where you keep the computer (you certainly don’t keep your computer anywhere near where you’re pouring liquids and sticky stuff). So SousChef has a cooking mode, where the recipe is shown full-screen, white words on black background. SousChef calls it Ten-Foot Mode. I found that, on my 17-inch MacBook Pro, I could easily read a recipe from at least 25 feet away. I’m guessing if your kitchen is bigger than that, you don’t cook, you hire a cook.

Third, The Cloud. You can search through other users’ recipes, using them like they are your own. But the other user doesn’t have to be online for you to use the recipe. Acacia Tree Software, publishers of SousChef, hosts the recipes and when you go to search, you see results from your own database, or from The Cloud. Great way to learn how other folks do things.

Is SousChef perfect? No. Going back to the cooking with your computer feature, the program uses the Mac’s built-in speech recognition to navigate in 10-Foot Mode. That’s probably all well and good for those of you with perfect California non-accents. But for a Southern boy with a redneck Southern drawl (we don’t use certain consonants unless absolutely necessary), speed recognition jest don’t werk good. That’s not Acacia Tree Software’s fault, but it’s still a problem. They do allow you to use keyboard and scrollpad/mouse input in Cooking mode, but with goo all over your hands, that’s a bit risky.

Also, so far there are less than 3,000 recipes in The Cloud. And many of them are duplicates. Just for kicks, I searched for turkey and found three of the same recipe from Good Eats, a Food Network show.

But those are minor, and picky things. As the program grows, so will the database. And voice recognition will continue to improve.

Macsimum Rating 8 out of 10

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