Food App Review of the Week: Ice Cream Recipe Maker

Ice Cream Recipe Maker from Fine Cooking
Developer: Taunton Press
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: www.finecooking.com

There is nothing better on a hot summer day than great homemade ice cream. But if you’re going to go through the trouble of making your own ice cream, why would you settle for a simple chocolate or vanilla? Ice Cream Recipe Maker from Fine Cooking magazine is a terrific step-by-step mix and match ice cream recipe generator.

The app is very simple in process. Click the begin button, select up to two infusions from 15 choices, click next, select up to two flavor additions from 19 choices, click next, select up to three mix-in options from 22 choices, click next and voila! You have your very own ice cream recipe. I’m no mathematician so I’ll take the developers word that this can result in an amazing 45 million flavor possibilities; utilizing some pretty unique ingredients such as basil, Nutella, tea leaves, black pepper, Armagnac, Grand Marnier, crystallized ginger, and more. Fine Cooking teamed up with chef David Lebovitz to develop this creative list of options.

When you finally reach your recipe page you only have two options, reset the recipe creation or e-mail the recipe. It’s the simplicity in the app that makes it great, but it’s also that same simplicity that keeps it from reaching its full potential. As you create your ice cream, you can’t adjust previous selections by clicking back a step—something I wanted to do from the very first ice cream recipe that I created. How was I to know that whiskey was a flavor option and prunes were a mix-in option? Moreover, once I’ve created my sweet treat, I can’t save it or add it to a folder—all I can do is e-mail it to myself.

The graphics and layout of this app are nice. Each ingredient option has its own image thumbnail–however the ingredients don’t offer any type of description or information. It would also be nice if there was some sort of guidelines of matching flavor combinations (this might even be done with a few preloaded recipes).

Lastly, I created many different ice cream recipes in my testing and all of them seem to use the same base, which is a classic rich custard base ice cream. For whatever reason you want to make a different type of ice cream, you’ll have to look elsewhere for the base.

Overall, this app scores a lot of points for its usefulness and is even a little addictive in mixing and matching the ice cream combinations. A few minor tweaks and I might even scream for this ice cream app.

Toque Rating: 4/5