MacGourmet: A Food and Wine Software Review

MacGourmet: A Food and Wine Software Review
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MacGourmet Overview

If you’re a food and/or wine lover, then MacGourmet may be a Mac software that you might wish to add to your applications folder. You can even choose to get MacGourmet Touch so you can sync your recipes and notes to your iPhone.

See MacGourmet and MacGourmet Touch.

See MacGourmet Deluxe.

MacGourmet Features

macgourmet icon

These are the basic features available on MacGourmet -

  • Wine Notes - A good way to save wine labels and make notes about the different wines that you come across.
  • Cooking Notes - Electronic and storage for cooking notes and tips that you wish to save.
  • Smart Lists - You can organize your notes automatically based on certain actions that you ask MacGourmet to remember (e.g., save all recipes with certain ingredients in them, type of meals, etc.)
  • Find Tools - There are different useful tools for searching your food database such as Find, Cupboard Find, and Potluck find.
  • Shopping Lists - No need to make individual shopping lists. Just print out your grocery list based on your recipes. You can even save them for use later.
  • Chef View - Ability to view your recipes in a large format, so you can read easily while you cook.
  • Printing Themes - Several ways to print your recipes and notes.
  • Display Themes - You can have different ways to display your recipe box.
  • Web Clippings or Web Imports - You can import or clip recipes from the web in an easy way. Then, you can add them to your special collection.
  • Publish to the Web - If you want to publish recipes to your .Mac account or to a WebDav server, you can do so with MacGourmet.
  • Free Recipe Packs - You can easily download many sample recipes on MacGourmet.
  • Import and Export - If you wish to import from other software like MasterCook and Meal-Master, you can do so. There are also other import/export formats available.

macgourmet deluxe

These are additional features that are available on MacGourmet Deluxe. Or, you can purchase these features as additional plugins for MacGourmet* -

  • Meal Planning - You can plan your everyday meals using the weekly planner . And, you can even plan ahead for dinner parties and the like.
  • Cookbook-making - You can use the Cookbook Builder for making real PDF cookbooks that you can share with family and friends, or sell.
  • Nutritional Analysis - You can find out the nutritional information of your meals.

* All additional plug-ins for MacGourmet costs $9.95 each.

MacGourmet Touch

If you wish to add an iPhone functionality to your MacGourmet or MacGourmet Deluxe, you can purchase MacGourmet touch as an iPhone app for $4.99. See - https://www.macgourmet.com/touch/index.html

Additional Notes and Tips:

1. MacGourmet and MacGourmet Deluxe are both available as a free download, so you can try the software first before you buy.

2. Please note the following MacGourmet Requirements to make sure that you can run this food software on your Mac -

- Mac OS X 10.4 or later

- .Mac account or WebDav server for publishing

3. If you wish to share recipes with other users, there’s a Recipe Swap forum available on the Advenio site.

4. Before upgrading to a new MacOS system, make sure you back-up your data and store that back-up elsewhere.

5. Every now and then, the people at Mariner Software offers heavily discounted software sale. If you’re not in a rush to purchase your MacGourmet, the best thing to do is to use the trial version and then subscribe to their mailing list. This way, you’ll find out the best time to buy your food software.

Bottomline Review of MacGourmet/MacGourmet Deluxe (4 out of 5)

When it comes to feature-rich food software for the Mac platform, it is hard to beat MacGourmet. It offers very useful features for both the amateur and expert food and wine lovers. Being able to put all your recipes in one spot and use the various tools that MacGourmet offers can be a real time-saver.

My only real gripes with MacGourmet are the following:

  1. After upgrading to the latest MacOS, I seem to have lost all my initial data in MacGourmet. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but it was certainly frustrating to see that my initial work have been lost.

  2. I wish there was an easier, quicker way to transfer the ingredients section of my existing recipes to MacGourmet. As it stands, I have to write down each ingredient separately instead of just being able to copy and paste. That’s one of the reasons it is taking me so long to transfer my recipes to MacGourmet.

  3. It has a limited number of blog platforms it can publish to. For example, it is meant to be able to work with Blogger.com and Movable Type. However, popular platform Wordpress has been left out.

Even with all these gripes and limitations , I’m still happy to have bought MacGourmet Deluxe. I look forward to being able to use it more, especially as I build up my food blog and my first cookbook.

<strong>Check out MacGourmet</strong> - It costs $24.95. Additional plugin costs applicable.

Or, <strong>see MacGourmet Deluxe</strong> . It costs $44.95.