SousChef 1.2 review

SousChef, a recipe management database, follows in the footsteps of MacGourmet Deluxe (see MacUser, 21 November 2008, p32).

While there is some overlap in the functionality between the two, SousChef has many ground-breaking features that distinguish it from its rival.

Its interface is pretty much what you'd expect. On the left-hand side is a pane in which you can create folders and sub-folders to organise your recipe collection into different categories such as courses, types of cuisine, and so on. From here, you can also view the entire recipe library, organise your grocery lists - created automatically by dragging a particular recipe onto the grocery list icon - and see recently imported recipes.

Recipes can be added to SousChef from a text file, the Internet or even a MacGourmet database. It then identifies which elements of the recipe are the ingredients, method, name, and so on, highlighting these. Anything that it fails to identify can be highlighted by the user.

Once you've decided which recipe you want, it will be displayed in the right-hand pane. As you hover your mouse over the various lines of the recipe, each one is highlighted and gives you the option to open a drop-down menu. This lets you change quantities, add ingredients to a shopping list, find other recipes using the same ingredient and convert Imperial into metric units; though not the other way round.

One omission is the ability to hyperlink ingredients that are themselves recipes. Many recipes, for example, use a base sauce, so it would be useful to be able to link to that.

The left-hand pane contains your recipe library, and at the top there is a search field, which is where SousChef starts to get interesting. Typing in a term here returns two fields: one from your local database and the other from the 'Cloud'. This is SousChef's own online database of recipes. At the time of writing, it contained more than 90,000 recipes, but this will probably have reached over 100,000 by the time that you read this. This is, quite simply, a brilliant idea, and it's hard to imagine where it will stop. Of course, if you have secret family recipes you can block them from being added to the Cloud.

There are many other interesting features, such as 10-foot mode. This displays a recipe in a special full-screen mode, so that it can be read from 10 feet away. What's more, you can scroll through it using your Front Row remote. There's also a handy feature that lets you automatically publish recipes to a blog with just a few clicks.

Ben Lachman, SousChef's designer, has certainly put a lot of thought into how people will use his program, and we look forward eagerly to future developments.