MacGourmet - a Great Recipe Collection Manager for Mac

In another software review, I talked about finding a recipe application for Mac called Dishbase that I hoped would be the perfect solution to managing recipes on a Mac. It turns out that Dishbase wasn't quite what I'd expecting, even though it's completely free, but I recently found a couple other recipe managers for Mac OS X that might be just what I want. The programs are called MacGourmet and YummySoup. In this review, I'll talk about MacGourmet.

One of my biggest problems with Dishbase (the biggest, in fact), is that it has no mechanism, from within the application itself, to add your own recipes. It's simply a quick way, from the desktop, of accessing the recipe database at Dishbase.com. As such, it does a fine job. And if you want to, you can submit your recipes to Dishbase.com, which would them put them in the Dishbase application, but otherwise this isn't possible.

MacGourmet, on the other hand, allows this, along with a whole lot more. It's a shareware application (a full license costs $24.95), and not free like Dishbase, but the extra features and functionality will make the money well worth it for many people, I'd imagine.

So, what features does MacGourmet have?

For one, it allows you to enter in your own recipes. You can do this in a couple different ways. MacGourmet accepts recipe lists created in other applicatons, such as YummySoup and CookWare Deluxe. In fact, if you have a recipe file in any of the following formats, MacGourmet can import it: Cook'n, CookWare Deluxe, MacGourmet Binary, MacGourmet Text, MasterCook Mac, MasterCook MXP, Meal-Master, RecipeML, Yum XML

Of course, not everyone using MacGourmet will have used another recipe application, so most people will - at least at one point or another - have to type in their recipes by hand. Simply click to create a new recipe and then fill in the required forms. You can categorize a recipe by how difficult it is to prepare, or by what ingredients. There is also a category (visible in the second screen shot), for meals that can be prepared in 30 minutes, for those in a hurry.