Best recipe app Ive ever used

Maaaan, its ridiculous how helpful this app has been to me. I think Ive been using it over a year now and its incredible. I used to use another Mac recipe app and switched to this one and never looked back. Years before I also used some PC apps that didnt come close to this one, too.

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I LOVE:

* The import-from-web option. It will import from several big recipe sites automatically and does a pretty good job of it, but the manual import is really fast and easy: you just go to the webpage in the import, and you highlight things (like the name, description, attribution, yield, ingredients, directions, whatever) and click the label for it. This is really fast, I probably spend a max of 30 seconds going through the motions on a complicated recipe that actually provides info for a lot of fields, but most of the time its just name, ingredients, directions, attribution and it takes 10 seconds. You can also override the automatic import to do this on the aforementioned big recipe sites if you dont want all the info.

* The drag-and-drop feature for pictures is really easy.

* The formatting options for viewing/printing are great.

* The ability to tag things with keywords.

* Smart-lists, oh my god. These are fantastic. If youve ever made a smart playlist in iTunes, you will appreciate this. If you ever oscillate between different diet types, or have to prepare foods for different diets or cater to food allergies, this is priceless. You set up a list with rules, and recipes that fit the rules will be added automatically. So if you want all dairy-free recipes in one place, youd have a list with rules like "ingredients does not include milk, ingredients does not include cheese, ingredients does not include yogurt," and so on. I sometimes have to cater for small shoots for a webseries, so I have smart lists for low-carb, paleo, gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan, vegetarian, FODMAPs-free, GAPS, Kosher, etc. (Tip: when making lists using rules, double-check all the recipes that show up to update your rules; for example, a recipe might simply say "Pecorino" in the ingredients instead of cheese, and you can either edit that recipe to say "Pecorino cheese" or add a "does not include Pecorino" rule. Gluten-free can be a pain since there are alternative "flour"s, so I update recipes to specify wheat flour and then use "does not include wheat flour".) This has helped me personally as I try to rule out certain food allergies; Ill feel like theres nothing I can eat if I eliminate XYZ, but then I set up a smart list and realize theres a LOT of awesome stuff I can still eat.

I use smartlists along with keywords a lot, too. If something freezes well, I label it "freeze" and I have a list of things that I can freeze if I know Ill be short on time. I have another "crockpot" label for similar reasons. I have a "canning" and "dehydrator" label. I have a "put on meat" label for anything that is a sauce, relish, marinade, dressing, or rub for times that I have meat and dont want to think much about it. I have keywords for different holidays so I can see all my Thanksgiving and Christmas recipes in one place. Im soon going to include the Cuisine type field so I can match up different ethnic dishes; Ive been neglecting that field for a while.

* Being able to type an ingredient and see everything that includes it is fantastic. Its like having my own personal Punchfork.

* The grocery list option I dont use terribly much, but the few times I have it has worked much better than other programs. The issue all recipe programs have with this is that you might have just "cilantro" listed in one recipe and another that calls for "fresh cilantro" and then you have butter measured in sticks in one recipe, tablespoons in another, ounces in another, grams in another... and it can turn into a big mess, plus I usually have most ingredients already, so I tend to do it by hand. But this is considerably easier to deal with in YummySoup. For one thing, it lets you set up options so that, say, "tbsp", "Tbsp", "tablespoon" all convert to one thing, and once the list is generated you have some control to edit and merge things.

* You can rate recipes, rate their difficulty, and mark which ones youve previously prepared. This is nice also because you can make a smart list of recipes youve tried, or recipes you need to try. I really like that there is a *private* notes field as well; I jot thoughts there sometimes about what worked and what didnt.

* I have had only good experience with the support, although I have barely needed it (Ive never had the app not work). I decided to write this review today because I sent the developer a question about a shortcut key, and got a response in 10 minutes. :-)

I havent used the recipecast feature; it sounds pretty cool but Im drowning in recipes as it is, so Ive never gotten around to it.

I can highly recommend the OS X version. I believe the iOS version is a rough draft right now, but Im eagerly looking forward to its completion; right now I just position my computer on the dining table as I cook to refer to YummySoup, but it will be convenient to use my phone. (And it will make me want an iPad even more badly…)

I will note that right now it wont calculate nutritional data, but that is "coming soon." One of the things I like about YummySoup is that it doesnt do that because most apps push it on you and I dont like fussing with it, though I trust this developer will make it unobtrusive. Until then, I suggest using another service to calculate the data and recording the info either under the private notes, the description, or at the end of the directions; Ive done that with a few low-carb recipes. If the developer integrates nutrition into smartlists, I bet that would make a lot of dieters happy though...

N. R. B. about YummySoup!