Apps for Cooks #1

Hello everyone I’m James, husband to Cheri. One of my passions is consumer electronics, and by far my favourite gadget is the iPhone & iPod touch. For me the obvious reason it’s the best device is all the amazing developers making very cool and useful apps.

Over the past few weeks I have been searching and testing applications to help in the kitchen. Surprisingly there is a lack of good applications in this category. There are a lot of recipe and food information apps… but honestly I don’t get the point, who wants to pay for something they can find for free online. Even the ones which are free for the most part are just a slower way to get what’s already online. So other than maybe proving useful while out at a friends house, who doesn’t have internet, these apps are not worth taking up space on my iphone.

A good application, for me, is something that solves a problem otherwise unsolved, makes something I can do on my computer better, or is a useful tool while I can’t get to my computer. I think I’ve found some apps that do exactly that for cooks and foodies.

The app Cheri and I have been using this week is called the Kitchen Calculator Pro. After downloading piles of useless applications this one is absolutely refreshing and definitely helps in the the kitchen. Immediately upon launching the application your welcomed with a easy on the eyes, straight to business start page, which I like. I can’t stand applications that insist on you seeing the splash page for 5 seconds every time you need to do a 3 second task.

Kitchen Calculator Pro is a hardcore ingredient, recipe, and substance conversion tool with FRACTIONS. This app makes easy work of converting teaspoons to pints, drops, and quarts. Being specifically designed for the kitchen there is no wasted space with unnecessary non-applicable measurement or mass units, again straight to the point about food.

Better still is its ability to auto round your math into fractional calculations. So when your angrily trying to decipher one half of two thirds, you don’t have to eye ball a guestimate where the invisible half line in the two thirds cup is… not that I’ve ever done that:) Being able to calculate in fractions is a huge help when you have to scale your recipes. Not mentioning the frustration of doing the real math yourself… who remembers math class anyway!

Kitchen Calculator Pro also enables mass to volume conversions or visa versa. This is accomplished with an extensive library of ingredients which have been pre weighed and measured. Given that no ingredient nor brand of ingredient will be the same, Kitchen Calculator Pro allows you to input your own data to compensate this. We found this feature is very powerful, although it’s not one you need every day or week, but when you do need it, it’s extremely useful. This feature by itself could easily be it’s own app.

This is an app that is worthy of the price, it will save you time and frustration. The fine folks at Forward Leap have done a wonderful job building this kitchen tool, I’ve no doubt you will all love it! Get your copy here.

What are your favourite iphone or ipod app?