Recipe management with excellent tagging options

It’s not very often that I can say this, but when I reviewed Recipe Center, I was really surprised to find that it was free. The reason? This app has all the features you would expect in a pay-for software, along with an interface that is – in recipe software terms – pretty slick.

Recipe software, as I have mentioned before, is often at the bottom of the attractive software scale. Recipe Center, however, isn’t all that bad, and apart from the unpleasant pink background color, is actually quite pleasant to use. It comes with a selection of recipes already imported, and adding, modifying and removing recipes is easy.

Recipe Center also has Basket and Shopping functions, the former for collecting various recipes in one place – useful when planning a meal, for example, and the latter for creating custom grocery lists for when you hit the store. It’s easy to add recipes and ingredients to the features – Basket is on the bottom-left of the interface and Shopping on the bottom-left.

Slowing Recipe Center down is the fact that it has limited export formats (just Meal Master) and the Advanced Recipe Encoder – a tool meant to make importing recipes easier – didn’t work well. Unfortunately, I also found it impossible to import recipes from the Recipe Center website, despite following instructions to the letter.

Importing and exporting recipes with Recipe Center was problematic, but the rest was plain sailing.