Tag: Cooking »

Sometimes in the cooking process the most important thing is not finding ingredients for a recipe you find, it is finding the right recipe for the ingredients you already have. This sort of backwards engineering was the idea behind the new Foodmatic app from Limit Point Software.

Instead of mindlessly digging through recipes with impossible to find ingredients, Foodmatic lets you choose the ingredients that you want to use and then recommends recipes and other ingredients to make what you have shine. Once your ingredient list is compiled, the app acts as a teaching tool and rates your ingredient list by how well the combinations fit together. Skilled chefs, or anyone competing on Chopped, will tell you that anything and everything can be put together if done right, but for most aspiring chefs, this grading system is extremely helpful in learning what flavors go together.

Experienced chefs will also get a kick out of tweaking old classics with new ideas from the Foodmatic system. By adding ingredients that you already know to work in a dish, the app will suggest new ingredients that are known to work in harmony. The Foodmatic database has over 700 ingredients and uses an in-house algorithm to create sure that the recommended flavor profiles work with each other. According to the Foodmatic website, the team spent months researching flavor combinations of regional and uncommon foods, as well as seasonal ingredients that work in unsuspecting dishes.

If you like cooking or are just starting to learn the craft, give Foodmatic a whirl and try to find your own perfect food combination. I think you'll really dig the build quality of the app and the high quality ingredient and recipe recommendations.

"Foodmatic was born from our passion for delicious great-tasting food. Foodmatic is for people who love food as much as we do," said the developers about the app. "Whether you're someone who thinks they can't cook at all or a professional chef looking to inspire new creativity in your cooking, Foodmatic will help you cook and eat better food. So whether you're just trying to spruce up a bowl of macaroni & cheese or think you could be the next top chef, Foodmatic will help you be more innovative and creative in your everyday cooking."

As far as home cooking goes, there really aren't that many people that make soup any more. People are more than willing to grill anything from steak to pineapple and make all sorts of cheesy casserole concoctions, but nobody spends the time these days to let a bunch of ingredients simmer in a pot for an hour or so to create a drool-inducing soup. The art of soup making these days has been replaced by Campbell's Chunky soup and assorted Progresso variations, leaving us with bland concoctions that have no love to give.

Viki and Joe, a married couple in Budapest and the developers of the app, decided that the world needed real soup and mixed their love of soup and apps into Hungarian Soups. According to the couple, Hungary is a soup consuming nation that starts any traditional three course meal with a hearty soup. Their "national" soup is the world famous goulash (of which there are around 6,000 varieties), but the country is also known for sour cherry soup and a wide variety of bean soups.

Their app doesn't quite cover every variety of all of their national soups, but it does contain 25 Hungarian soups that have all been tested in their home as meals. Each recipe comes with rich color pictures, detailed ingredient lists, and step by step instructions to streamline the process. Ingredient shoppers will also be happy to find a shopping list function included for added convenience.

With Hungarian Soups you can stop fearing the art of soup making and really dive into some rich Hungarian meals. Now you'll be able to put away that over-processed can of Campbell's and make some hearty beef goulash that you know your family will pour over.

All this goulash talk is making me hungry...

Roasting meat, in the cooking world, is about as simple as it gets. The greatest roast recipe I've ever found is from Michael Ruhlman's website, with the recipe titled, "The World’s Most Difficult Roasted Chicken Recipe."

Turn your oven on high (450 if you have ventilation, 425 if not). Coat a 3- or 4-pound chicken with coarse kosher salt so that you have an appealing crust of salt (a tablespoon or so). Put the chicken in a pan, stick a lemon or some onion or any fruit or vegetable you have on hand into the cavity. Put the chicken in the oven. Go away for an hour. Watch some TV, play with the kids, read, have a cocktail, have sex. When an hour has passed, take the chicken out of the oven and put it on the stove top or on a trivet for 15 more minutes. Finito.

The real trick with roasts, which is also the only direct instruction in the world's most difficult roast, is getting the temperature right for your giant piece of meat. Don't fret though, there's an app for that.

Time To Roast, by Hemingsby Limited, calculates the cooking time and temperature for your meat from the size and type of the meat. It'll help you cook up the traditional chickens, pigs, and cows, but will also tell you how long to cook ducks, lamb, geese, and turkeys. It has a simple as pie interface, with direct, easy to read instructions, and is sure to guide you to making the best roast of your life.

Just remember to not panic while you're waiting. These things take time and, unlike your kids or significant other, need absolutely no attention.

It's Friday, and that means that it's time for another Friday Five: five interesting apps released in the past week. Enjoy!

Mikado Defenders
Mikado Defenders is a tower defense game, but with a feudal-era Japan theme. Mystical guardian spirits come to your aid, demons attack, samurai commanders can be recruited, and of course you can improve upon your castle. The traditional-style artwork provides a gorgeous backdrop. You can deploy samurai foot soldiers, archers, and other units. The result is an epic war between demons and Japanese warriors...a neat change from typical tower defense.

Slingshot Safari
Slingshot Safari is a cartoon-style game that tests your slingshot style against lions, tigers, cheetahs, and more. Animals react differently to your shots, but none of them will be too pleased when you try to shoot them—and you're far from immortal! The graphics are funny, you can unlock eight levels, Plus+ is included, and the menagerie of ten different animals should keep your slingshot skills sharp.

How to Cook Everything
This extremely useful new app is essentially an iPhone-optimized cookbook based on the real-life one from Mark Bittman. Of course, there are many perks to having a cookbook on your iPhone or iPad instead of a physical book, especially when said book normally weighs in at 1,000 pages. In addition to the 2,000 recipes and 400 illustrations, you get full search capabilities, built-in timers, and shopping lists...all in the palm of your hand, and for only $1.99. The interface is easy to use, and the sheer wealth of information is staggering. No wonder it's become a bestseller.

Field Agent
Like making money? Of course you do. Field Agent is a new app that aims to help you do just that. It lists simple, easy-to-do jobs—going to Wal-Mart and taking a picture of a product, filling out a survey, visiting a website—and then pays you for them. It's not just pennies, either; all jobs pay at least $3, and some can dish out as much as $12. Money is transferred to you via PayPal. Who knew that your iPhone could do anything but suck your wallet dry? The only downside right now is the lack of jobs, but the app is free to use, so you might as well check what's nearby!

Fruit Ninja
Fruit Ninja is the epitome of simple, easy-to-play, and addictive. Fruit is tossed onto the screen and you have to slice it before it falls back down. The graphics are bright, the touch controls are simple, and a few neat extras like dangerous bombs and Plus+ integration are included. The premise is certainly unusual, and intentionally silly. Looks like ninjas can make a mean fruit salad.