Review: Southern Living's Big Book of BBQ

Creator: Southern Living (Time Inc. Lifestyle Group)
Requirements: Compatible with iPad. Requires iOS 3.2.2 or later.

Cost: $7.99 (Price increasing to $12.99 after July 4, 2012)
Link: Big Book of BBQ


A few years ago I took one of Chef Troy Black's BBQ classes, he is the Southern Living Pitmaster. It was a great class and I learned a lot about competition BBQ from it. A couple months later, I found out he had worked on the Big Book of BBQ for Southern Living. I saw it at Books-a-Million on day and flipped through it. It looked good but I didn't have it in the budget to purchase it. A couple weeks later, I was looking through iPad apps and came across the Big Book of BBQ app. I thought it sounded very familiar so I looked at the information about it and it was the app of the same book. At $7.99 I figured it would be worth the purchase. It was.

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.

App Review: GrillStar App

Creator: Ryan Michel
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 4.2 or later.

Cost: $.99
Link: GrillStar

Summer is here and it’s time to fire up that grill (unless you’re crazy like me and cook all year round). Time to feed the family in that old-as-time tradition of cooking over an open flame. They want to eat chicken but every time you grill it, you burn it. You want to grill up some fresh veggies but don’t know how long to cook them for. No worries. GrillStar can solve that problem.

This is a great little app for $.99. You can put your meat, seafood or veggies on a virtual grill and a timer is set to remind you when to turn it over or pull it off on your real grill. Remember, “If you’re lookin’, you ain’t cookin’.” This app give you information you need to cook your food correctly on the grill as well as some good grilling tips.

The cook times assume your meat is thawed completely, which it should be when you grill, but if it isn’t you need to take that into consideration. The UI is a little difficult to find where things are, but once you figure it out it isn’t bad.

On the Gibbs Ribs scale* I give this app a 3/4’s rack. It is very useful and well thought out but the UI could use some improvement.


*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.