I know that various forms of recipe organizing software exist and I'm sure many of them are very good. As an average home cook, however, I have never found the "store all recipes on your laptop or desktop" solution very satisfying. I don't want to muck up my laptop keyboard or screen with flour or grease spatter.
Along comes Apple's revolutionary use of the Multi-Touch display, that layers a protective shield over a capacitive panel that senses your touch using electrical fields. This is a genius product for cooks who use the internet or want access to the recipes on their hard drives without gooing up the mechanisms or their laptops. But what if you don't want to accidentally drop your iPhone in the boiling water while trying to read a recipe direction?
The Demy Kitchen Safe Touchscreen Recipe Reader by manufacturer Key Ingredients uses a similar glass screen technology, but has a size, weight, and function that is more conducive to kitchen use. This recipe reader brings us one step closer to having a kitchen friendly digital cookbook. The folks at Key Ingredient sent me a sample to review for this blog.
It's a pretty simple idea. The recipe reader comes loaded with a solid batch of recipes, but stores up to 2500 recipes of your choosing. All you have to do is load your recipes to their online recipe site www.keyingredients.com and sync your Demy to your account via a provided USB cable.
After setting up a quick account at www.keyingredients.com, I was able to quickly copy over a few recipes from a few other online sites, using their bookmarklet. I even hand typed a few recipes without trouble. Key Ingredients also offers a service called scanmyrecipes.com that allows you to send them a hard copy of your recipes. They will scan them, transcribe them, and add them to your account for $0.49 per recipe.
Key Ingredients is a pretty slick recipe website with a couple of features to highlight. You can sort collected recipes into online cookbooks of your making. This is quite useful and a feature I haven't seen on other sites. Additionally, they offer a cookbook publishing service that allows you to have your online cookbooks printed and sent to you in book form. You can view an online tour of the printing process and more at their site.
After downloading the necessary Key Ingredients software to my hard drive, I hooked up my Demy. The recipes loaded to the recipe reader in about 5 minutes. I did have bit of trouble getting the Key Ingredients software to recognize that my Demy was actually plugged in at first. This has only happened once and I was able to trouble shoot it without customer service attention so I'm choosing to believe this was user error.
You can view recipes using an alphabetical index or view them within your cookbooks. You can create a short list that allows you to access a set of recipes for a special meal. This would be particularly useful during the holidays when you may need to multi-task with a variety of recipes. To help you keep track of multiple cook times, the Demy includes three timers. I think three timers is plenty, since I my kitchen can't really handle more than five separate tasks at a time. The only thing I would suggest they add in the next version is a way to flag each timer for separate dishes using either a different sound or text entry. Finally, there is a quick conversion calculator and a snazzy ingredient substitute list that seems to include most things an average cook might need.
All of these features work quite well and the device seems pretty comprehensive. As an enthusiastic user of Apple's iPhone, I found a couple of features a little frustrating. First, the touch sensitive screen requires a little more patience than I expected. You really have to hold you finger pad over the menu button you choose in order to get where you want to go. However, touching the screen to scroll worked just as expected.
I also hope that they'll release the next version with WiFi. By now, most people get the sync to computer concept, but I think users have become more accustomed to having internet access with gadgets of all sorts. In this case, I think the addition of WiFi would only strengthen the products usefulness in the kitchen. Often, when I'm cooking and need additional ideas I like to browse through other recipes either online or in cookbooks. I think this would also boost their community and networking features on keyingredients.com. It would be great to post questions about techniques while you're cooking and get answers instantly.
The final feature I think Key Ingredients could upgrade is the battery. The version I have requires a little more maintenance than I hoped. You really have to charge the thing once a day if you've used it for an hour or so.
All that said, I think this is big step in the right direction for bringing digital cookbooks into the kitchen. And it's a great alternative to keeping your Kindle in a ziploc bag, or your tree-wasting print-outs for that matter.
