Recipe Aggregation Tools

Description

By Kevin Fitchard:

" 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’ web portal. I discovered they’re all great services for saving and cataloging specific types of recipes, but they all share a single huge limitation. First, the good

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 is stored in your digital online library forever more.

Paprika and MacGourmet perform similar types of website scraping, but they do so within embedded browsers. You surf to a recipe page through the apps, and when you press the save button, both generate digital recipe cards with the relevant fields for ingredients, their individual measurements, directions, notes, even dietary information and photos. Both apps go beyond just storing recipes, though. With both, 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 want you cook before you go to the store or if you happen upon some tremendous deal on lamb chops and change your meal plans on the fly." (http://gigaom.com/2011/12/24/why-its-impossible-to-build-a-digital-recipe-library/)

More Information

• While this post identifies the problem of cataloging recipes in the digital age, my follow-up post explores a possible solution. For more read A better recipe for digital cuisine: Why digital cookbooks need to emulate digital music." [1]