The Accidental Locavore’s App of the Week Review
And the Food App of the Year is…
The Accidental Locavore was really busy earlier this month, not that this isn’t a busy month anyway, working through a dozen contenders in Toque Mag’s Food App of the Year. It was an interesting experience, part fun and part work. There are a lot of really good food apps out there and even more pretty lame ones. While my favorite of the apps I judged, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, won its category, Best Cookbook/Recipe App, it missed taking home the overall award. That went to an app the Locavore had reviewed earlier (but didn’t for this competition) 42 Restaurants.
The most fun was the chance to play with apps I might not normally gravitate to. There were a bunch of wine/liquor related ones, so I’ve now had the chance to update my (city) wine cellar, figure out how much Scotch is left in every bottle (well, as of two weeks ago) and can rest safe in the knowledge that I have everything on hand to make a “Buffalo Sweat” (bourbon and Tabasco). If that wasn’t enough, I can grill all kinds of food (when the weather gets warmer), bake unlimited loaves of bread and figure out the nutritional value of anything (almost) in the grocery store.
And in looking over the list of winners, there are definitely apps I didn’t get to review, like Great Maine Food, that the Locavore will add to her collection. Why don’t you check out the list of winners and comment on the ones you’d like to add?
Many thanks to Steve and Erika at Toque Mag for inviting me to judge!
App of the Week Review: Ratio
The Accidental Locavore has been in the middle of judging for Toque’s 2011 Food App Awards, so make sure you check in on December 8th to see who the winners are. In the meantime, I’ve been taking Michael Rhulman’s Ratio for a spin. My father and others I know are crazy about the book this app is based on, but since I don’t own the book, the Locavore can’t really say whether the app is better than the book or vice-versa.
The idea behind both is that most food preparation falls into certain ratios. Once you know what the rules (ratios) are, you’re free to mess around with the ingredients. So if you want to make cookies, it’s helpful to know that it’s 1 part sugar to 2 parts fat to 3 parts flour. What’s not helpful is that the default number of cookies you’ll be making is 6. Now, when was the last time you broke out the mixer to make 6 cookies? To up the number of cookies, there’s no way to change it to 24 cookies, you can only do that by changing one of the ratio ingredients (8 ounces of sugar will give you 24 cookies according to this).
Another issue is how to figure out how many egg yolks there are in 6 ounces (hollandaise sauce). Do you know? The app lacks a measurement option for units (like yolks). There are all the usual options like saving your favorites, making notes, and of course, sharing on Facebook or email (does anyone actually do that?).
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Ratio
Developer/Seller: Rhulman Enterprises
Cost: $4.99
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Website: http://ruhlman.com/apps/
App of the Week Review: Time to Roast
Just in time for Thanksgiving, the Accidental Locavore discovered Time to Roast. It’s a great little app that does one thing and does it well. When you want to roast meat or poultry (and you have to love that it includes duck and goose!), it does the math for you.
After you load it, you set up the time it takes your oven to heat up (mine’s slooooww), what type of oven it is, weight in pounds or metric, temp in centigrade or Fahrenheit. That’s it.
When you’re planning a dinner, simply plug in the type and weight of your roast, how well done you want it, when you want to serve it and voila, it tells you when (and if needed, how) to start. Along the way, (loud) alarms go off to tell you when your oven has heated up, the roast is cooked, resting times, etc. If you just want to pop the bird in right now, it will ask if your oven is preheated and depending on your response, give you the proper timetable (and alarms). A very efficient little app!
If that’s not good enough, their support people got back to me so quickly when I commented on a feature I couldn’t find–kudos to them!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Time to Roast
Developer/Seller: Hemingsby Limited
Cost: $.99 (worth it!)
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Website: http://www.hemingsby.com/app/time-to-roast
App of the Week: Chefs Feed
If you, like the Accidental Locavore, often wonder where chefs eat when they’re not working and you’re not hanging out with one*, Chefs Feed is an amusing app. It lists the city’s best chefs for each of (currently) four cities with their favorite dishes, ranging from haute to ‘hood. It’s not apparent how often the basic information is updated, but there is a” live feed” (Twitter) and it’s reasonably live.
If you’re hungry, tap on “Feed me Now” and a list of favorite dishes with your distance to them, comes up. This is not in real time, nor is it based in reality, just proximity. For example, since the Accidental Locavore is writing this within 0.6 miles of Columbus Circle, one of the feed-me-now dishes is Thomas Keller’s Oysters & Pearls at Per Se. If you’re familiar with Per Se, you’re chuckling now, if you’re not, just pick up a phone and see when you can book a table. 2012 comes to mind…
That’s where the “Plan It” button would seem to come in to play. When you touch it, you don’t get automatically directed to the phone or website (that comes later), you just get it added to your itinerary in your profile. If you should score a huge bonus and a table and order Oysters and Pearls, you can then tell everyone you ate it (the usual suspects, FB, Twitter and email) and rate the dish.
Chefs Feed is currently in Chicago, NY, LA and San Francisco, with plans to add Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, Philly and Washington DC.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (more amusing than useful)
Chefs Feed
Developer/Seller: Credible Inc.
Cost: free
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android, Blackberry
Website: http://www.chefsfeed.com/
*Masak, the Meat Week kickoff party and tonight, Mas la grillade (but I’m not saying who the chef is).
App of the Week: Tasting Table
True confession time, Tasting Table is one of the Accidental Locavore’s favorite food-based newsletters (Serious Eats is right up there too), so when they decided to do an app for the site, it immediately got downloaded. It wasn’t until recently that I started to play with it. If you’re not in NY, SF, LA, Chicago or Washington DC, this is not the site (or app) for you. Essentially what the app does, is to take the contents of the newsletter and let you carry it around with you. Now, how useful this is…
If you’re in NY and you click on articles about markets, you get nothing, if you go to the national edition, three choices come up, the most recent being a promo for Open Sky. It’s much more useful in finding restaurants, or referring to the articles about dining or drinking. With the newsletter you always have the option of saving anything (recipe, restaurant review, etc.) to a “to-do” list and that, happily, is easily accessed with the app.
Downsides: an annoying pop-up ad for tortillas that doesn’t go away. An inexplicable list of places “nearby”. It’s inexplicable because when you click on a push-pin and find it’s Fairway (market) the description is not for Fairway Market, but for an article on salsa from 2010. And it’s only iPhone compatible. Currently it’s on the Tasting Table website, although the iTunes store says it’s not available in the US.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (For one of my favorite newsletters, the app is sadly lacking)
Tasting Table
Developer/Seller: Tasting Table
Cost: free
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Website: http://tastingtable.com/togo/
App of the Week Review: Fooducate
The Accidental Locavore has suffered from nut allergies and hates to have to pull out glasses to peruse food labels, so Fooducate would seem to be a great app. You scan the bar-codes of various products and it delivers a grade from A-F, a calorie count and a percentage of how many people like (or don’t like) the product. Below that is a brief explanation as to how it got that rating (this can be expanded for some serious nutritional info…maltodextrin anyone?). It offers 5 similar food alternatives and allows you to scan and compare your food choices. If you don’t have a barcode, you can just type in something, say bananas, and it will come back with a list for you to choose from. Fooducate also keeps a list of things you’ve looked up, so if you need a reminder that Oreos aren’t good for you…
While this is probably a good app for someone on a diet (and would seem to be made for Weight Watchers), there are flaws. First of all for the Locavore, there are no lists of ingredients and no way to customize the app. Supposedly, that’s coming in a future version. So if I scan a can of mixed nuts, there are no alarms going off to tell me this is forbidden territory, not so important with that, but hugely important with things like power bars and granola, all of which seem to contain some nut products (one of the reasons I make my own granola).
Secondly, of four products I pulled out of the cupboard, only two of them were found. A bag of Doritos (empty) got a C-and a can of oatmeal from Whole Foods (A-). There are no F’s “if it fills your tummy, ANY food has served an important service…” Not sure I agree with that! A bag of Aborio rice from Whole Foods wasn’t found, although there are about 25 listed when you search for them, with ratings from A to B-. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the fluctuations in the ratings. My fourth item, a box of crackers from Eli Zabar would have shocked me if it was included and it wasn’t. You can send them photos of anything that’s not listed and they will (supposedly) list it in the future.
Rating: 3 out of 5 (Waiting for the customizable version, some flaws)
Fooducate
Developer/Seller: Fooducate Ltd.
Cost: free ($3.99 for plus version, no ads)
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android
Website: http://www.fooducate.com/
App of the Week: Epi
OMG, the Accidental Locavore actually used an app before reviewing it! I was looking for something to make with crab meat other than crab cake, so I whipped out my phone and the Epi app. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the app version of Epicurious (Bon Appetite, the late Gourmet and…who knew…Self magazines). I put in crabmeat and the first thing that came up was a crabmeat risotto with peas…cool.
Every recipe has a little + sign in the corner which brings up a menu. One of the options on the menu is to create a shopping list. It’s pretty easy and divided into produce, seafood, etc. The more murky part is that it’s not entirely clear whether you’re supposed to check off what you need or what you have and it doesn’t seem to remove things (checked or unchecked) from the list. You can then email the entire list (again no editing), but I just kept it on the app.
Other good features, you can access reviews of the recipes. Because of that, I opted for seafood stock for my risotto instead of veggie stock. You can also save recipes to “Favorites” but if you want to sync them it will cost you $1.99. And of course, you can tweet all about it…
A couple of complaints (come on, you didn’t think this was perfect, did you?): there doesn’t seem to be a way to keep the list version as a default, so whenever go back to the homepage or search, you have to reset the list view. There are two categories on the home page “I Can Barely Cook” and “I Cook Like a Pro” where you could nit-pick about the levels involved in making a dish. Granted you have to cook like a pro to (successfully) make a Christmas Croquembouche, a very carefully constructed tower of 55 cream puffs with a cage of spun sugar over it, in this case Americanized with chocolate sauce and (so sorry Julia) M&M’s. Then, the next recipe on the list is for mashed potatoes, not a pro-level dish…and no matter what your level of cooking is, do you really want to make Steamed Soy Milk Custard ?
While some of the recipes are very recent, there are also a couple of typos, and for the non-cook some specialized ingredients, techniques or equipment that might not be considered basic.
The crabmeat risotto was a success, but you’ll have to stay tuned for the full report!
Rating: 4 out of 5 (Good recipe selection, some flaws)
Epi
Developer/Seller: CondeNet
Cost: free ($1.99 to sync favorites)
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Website: http://www.epicurious.com/services/mobile
App of the Week: Announcing App of the Year Awards
The Accidental Locavore is pleased to be invited to judge the first annual Toque Food App Awards. These awards will honor the best of food apps in a variety of categories, including food, drink, wine and restaurants. If you’re interested in submitting an app, the deadline is October 28, so get a move on! I can’t wait to start trying them out!
Here’s the link: http://www.toquemag.com/food-app-entry-form
The following is a list of categories:
App of the Year (From top to bottom, the food app that should be on everyone’s smartphone)
Best Value (Provides the best bang for the buck)
Best Design (Snapshots of the app look like they could hang in an art gallery)
Best Navigation (The easiest, most intuitive and most unique way to get around in an app)
Best Branded App (An app created by and for the purposes of promoting a brand)
Best Innovation (App that does something new and unique and better than everyone else—others are likely to copy)
Best Food Guide (App that focuses on a single food category and provides everything you need to know)
Best Cooking App (App that improves your cooking knowledge/understanding/ability)
Best Baking App (App that improves your baking knowledge/understanding/ability)
Best Drink App (App that improves your drink knowledge/understanding/ability)
Best Utility App (App that is as useful in your kitchen as a chef’s knife)
Best Social App (App that connects with other foodies)
Best Restaurant App (App by and/or for a restaurant)
Best Novelty App (App that is more clever and fun than useful—something you’d show your friends)
Best Cookbook/Recipe App (App that focuses on delivering recipes)
Best Celebrity Chef App (App from a well-known chef)
Best Health Food App (App that focuses on eating healthy)
Best Fast Food App (App that focuses on fast food—can be from a fast food franchise)
Best Food Locator App (App for finding food, from a food truck to a farmer’s market)
App of the Week: Evernote
So today, the Accidental Locavore was thinking about what apps I actually use on a day-to-day basis. Surprisingly, it’s not the cooking apps, although Keep Recipes is probably going to get more and more use as I get more stuff on it and I refer to Jamie Oliver’s Recipes, because it’s the best one I’ve seen so far.
The Locavore has come to depend on one app that I had real issues with at the beginning…Evernote. It’s a word processing app that syncs itself with all your devices and saves it on the cloud. For example: I’m writing this on my iPhone while traveling (on the subway) to a lunch date. When I get back to my desk, it will sync with my desktop, laptop and iPad. It’s great for taking notes at meetings, you can use it for saving e-mail and dictate to it if your thumbs are too big for your phone (among other features I haven’t explored yet). It also gives you lots of options for saving and finding your work.
My (big) initial issue with Evernote was that after two hours of writing a few months ago, it synced itself and I lost everything. In doing that I exposed a flaw in the app (which has since been fixed), so now, if anything is critical, I just copy & paste it into notes.
While I was pissing & moaning about the issue, the Locavore finally got the attention of the CEO. He’s totally accessible and we ended up having a great conversation about his recent trip to Indonesia for a cooking class. Now that the bug has been fixed (and, no, I never got my work restored) this is one app that I use almost every day.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (Still waiting/hoping for a highlighter)
Evernote
Developer/Seller: Evernote
Cost: free (Premium with more storage and faster support: $5/month)
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Website: http://www.evernote.com/about/home.php
App of the Week: Cook’s Illustrated
This app is from Cook’s Illustrated magazine, a publication the Accidental Locavore thinks is one of those love-it-or-hate-it magazines. I’ll let you guess which side I come down on…
Cook’s Illustrated is a standard recipe app with a pretty large collection of recipes, grouped in alphabetical order, so desserts are the third thing on the list. If you’re not a member, you get about 10 recipes for free in each category. What makes these recipes a little different is that each one comes with the obsessive/compulsive explanation of the issues surrounding each and every dish. Once those hurdles are (successfully) overcome, the recipes are pretty straightforward.
Two attractive features are the ability to add ingredients to a shopping list, and a built-in timer that you can set to time various stages of a recipe. Now I’m not sure how much I want to be setting and resetting my iPhone while I’m browning chicken, but it’s there if you need it.
Another feature is their rating of various food products under “Taste Tests”. If you need to know what the best potato chip is, this is your app. Unfortunately, there is no telling when these taste tests were conducted, so products may or may not be the same as when they were rated. As with the recipes, there’s a detailed explanation as to the issues surrounding say, jarred salsa.
Downsides? You’re better off if you’re into the Cook’s Illustrated too-much-information mindset. The search engine is a little weird, returning everything but onion soup, when the Locavore searched for onion soup. It’s only an iPhone app, so you can’t take advantage of the screen size of an iPad. And today, the biggest downside? You can’t download it from the American app store, although the Cook’s Illustrated website has a link.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Cook’s Illustrated
Developer/Seller: Cook’s Illustrated
Cost: free for the basic recipes, $34.95 for a one year membership to the site
Compatible with: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
Website http://www.cooksillustrated.com/apps/
