Friday, July 15, 2011

App Review: On the House – Great Backyard Grilling

Creator: CulinartMedia, Inc.
Requirements: Compatible iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later.

Cost: $3.99
Link: Great Grilling

This app is well designed with intuitive navigation and great-tasting recipes that are easy to follow.

My likes:
There are some cool features that make this app shine for me. When I find a recipe I like, I can add it to my favorites, menu or shopping cart. Favorites help you find the recipes you like quicker. The menu helps you put together a menu for a dinner party or a grill night. The shopping cart puts all the ingredients in a list so you can figure out what you need to buy.

Being able to change the number of people cooking for and having the app modify the amounts of ingredients automatically is a great feature for chefs like me who may cook for my wife and kids one night then for the neighborhood block party the next. When the recipe calls for you to cook an item for a set time, you can touch the time in the recipe to open a timer and track your cooking time.

My dislikes:
A grilling app should not tell you to preheat the oven to make ribs. And working with multiple recipes simultaneously means I need multiple timers. Some recipes, for example, have you cooking a sauce on the stove and the meat on the grill. You need to time both. The currently empty video tips section needs to be populated. That would be an excellent addition to the app.

Overall the app is really useful. I recommend it for the recipes and ability to set up menus. The little extras make it nice, but the timers and lack of videos detract from its overall usefulness.

This was a tough decision to rate this app. It is so close to a full rack but in the end it receives a 3/4 rack of ribs on the rib's Gibbs scale*. Multiple timers, videos and turning the ribs recipe into a grill recipe would allow me to change the rating to a full rack.

*When I do reviews, books or otherwise, I will rate the items with ribs (they are my favorite BBQ dish). A full rack is great and a single rib is poor.

No comments:

Post a Comment