As the Web Chef and a food afficionado, I'm always interested to read about where consumers are finding food tips and recipes and how they are using online and offline tools to manage, organize and share their recipes. I've been a devotee of Epicurious.com for a number of years, but also enjoy the pleasure of clipping and trying recipes from the Food section of local and national papers.
Lifehacker had an interesting poll and review of the benefits of using online recipe management vs. traditional offline print. Of the 1580 votes, Lifehacker found that 36% of respondents weren't ready to move away from their print-based note cards, binders or notebooks. They continued to like these "old fashioned" ways as part of their cooking process.
My partner and I are part of this group. Even though we designed our kitchen during our remodelling and expansion project to include a Cat5 Internet connection and a pull out shelf for a laptop, we've found that the "traditional" mode still works best. (Besides that the shelf is now full of our overflow of Penzey's Herbs and Spices) We use a set of binders where we can take recipes from print sources (taped to a three hole drilled sheet), from friends, from online sources (printed out) and combine them into a binder indexed by major ingredient.
Lifehacker blogger Jason Fitzpatrick reviewed the online tools including the top four were rank ordered by survey respondents with these results - Other (18%), Evernote (17%), Other (18%), SousChef (14%), AllRecipes (9%) and Big Oven (5%).
So what other tools are out there?
I was curious so I did a search and came up with quite a few including 23 indexed and referenced in DMOZ..org and a few others that are either software or web-based:
- Food (online community and recipe storage)
- LivingCookbook (software for Windows)
- MacGourmet (software for the Mac)
- MasterCook (software)
- MyRecipeCircle (online community)
- OpenEats (online community)
- Recipezaar (online recipes)
- TasteBook(create your own cookbook)
You can also find a ranking and review of ten tools at TopTenReviews, where BigOvens ranked #1, followed by Living CookBook and MasterCook Deluxe.
Photograph of soup is from stock.xchng.
