There's no shortage of food and drink apps, but few rarely pack as many features as BigOven, well-beloved among online foodies for its practicality and ease.
BigOven, available for free on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Kindle Fire, is simply one of the most comprehensive food and cooking apps around, garnering accolades and honors for its wide array of features and overall usefulness.
It's essentially a giant recipe box that makes it easy and simple to access recipes tailored to nearly every occasion and taste: Through the app, you have access to a wide array of dishes and menus, which you can search by keyword, course and ingredient.
Beyond a finely tuned search mechanism, the app can also help you with ideas on how to use up leftovers. You enter what ingredients you have on hand in your refrigerator or pantry, and the app delivers recipes featuring those elements.
There's also a menu planning feature that will help you map out your week's cooking for the week, helping to plan and keep the kitchen running smoothly. There are also tools that help you scale recipes up and down, and convert them to and from metric.
Going beyond cooking, the app also offers a wide array of shopping features at the in-app Pro subscription level. The app will automatically generate a grocery list for any recipe, menu or day in the menu planner, as well as sort the shopping list into store sections and aisles to help you breeze through the crowded grocery store. The paid subscription also offers full nutritional information as well as access to recipes and menus for special dietary preferences and needs.
A paid subscription also enables the ability to add your own recipes through mobile technology — you can simply snap a picture of a handwritten or printed recipe in a magazine or on paper, and the app will convert it into digital form and save it to your BigOven account.
It's a great feature if you're always scavenging recipes from newspapers, backs of products or Grandma's dog-eared recipe books, offering a digital shortcut to collating and sorting through all different sources of information. (If you stick with the free version, you can add recipes via BigOven.com.)
You'll Want It If...
You're looking for a comprehensive cooking and shopping solution that suits nearly all levels of culinary interest from everyday foodies to practical working parents trying to shop and cook smart for their family. BigOven is packed with functionality, making it a great on-the-go shopping assistant and a great research resource in the kitchen.
Sometimes a wide array of features can overwhelm an app, making it hard to navigate, but BigOven remains easy to use and accessible, with a simple user interface and straightforward design.
It's Not My Thing — What Else Ya Got?
BigOven emphasizes the more practical, everyday aspects of domestic culinary arts, and has a fairly utilitarian look-and-feel to match its approach. Its lack of visual razzle-dazzle may not appeal it to more serious gourmands, who revel in more arcane ingredients as well as an equally elegant visual presentation to match.
These users might prefer something like Gojee, which has some of the same features but offers a more adventurous, though limited, array of recipes, presented in a visually gorgeous format.
Photo courtesy of Flickr, ctaloi
- Get in Touch With Your Inner Picasso
- Parents vs. Kids: Taking Charge of Gadgets
- Silly No More: Ridiculous CES Ideas That Hit
- Secret Geek: John Mayer Combines Music With Tech
This article originally published at Mobiledia here
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario