Food Apps of the Week: Pizza

Pizza is quite possibly the world’s most perfect food. The triangular slice itself can represent the entire food pyramid: meat, vegetable, dairy, bread, fruit, plus a little oil and fat. It’s delicious whether served hot or cold, it’s great for dinner or breakfast, and it fits just about any social setting like a sport coat. Here are five apps to better bond you and cheesy goodness.

Let’s Make Pizza!
Developer: ST55 Application
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: N/A

As the title suggests, this is an app for those who want to make their own pizza. Overall, however, this pie doesn’t have a lot of toppings. You open the app and you’re presented with 11 recipes, including image thumbnails and a short description of what you get with each pizza such as, “Low-fat, high fibre” or “Healthy spin on a classic pizza.” Two descriptions provide the time it will take to make the pizza—something that should have been included on all descriptions. Clicking on any of the pizzas will take you to a second page with a complete recipe, cooking instructions and nutritional content. Click on the pizza thumbnail and it’ll fill your screen for a better look. And that’s all there is to this app. No videos, no ability to e-mail a grocery list, no favorites. The app is well designed, but it’s difficult to recommend a pay app with so little offered.

Toque Rating: 2/5

Pizza Shuffle
Developer: 285 Digital Media Ltd.
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: http://285digital.com

“What do you want on your pizza?” How many times have you said those words while trying to order a pizza for a group? Pizza Shuffle is a topping randomizer that will generate a list of toppings for you. Open the app and you’ll begin to feel like you’re at your local pizzeria with music piping out of your phone’s speakers (you can turn the tunes off if you like). Click the “Shuffle” button and the pizza image will spin and reveal your pizza name with the list of toppings below—the pizza image even changes based on the toppings. You can adjust the number of toppings from one to five and even select a specific pizza joint you want the ingredients to pull from—a surprise feature that’s really great. Most of the listed pizza proprietors are household names from Dominos to Papa John’s (there are 10 ingredient lists to pull from in all). It would be nice if you could eliminate certain ingredients for those people who say, “I don’t care what’s on my pizza, just no mushrooms.” Otherwise, this app is about as good as a New York slice.

Toque Rating: 4.5/5

The Pizza Dough Recipes
Developer: Roger Lichfield
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: N/A

Any pizza connoisseur will tell you that the secret to great pizza is in the dough. This app is nothing more than a recipe e-book stuffed with a variety of pizza dough recipes. Click on an individual recipe name and you’re taken to the paragraph within a long page giving you instructions on creating your perfect crust. What’s not mentioned in the title is that this app also includes pizza sauce recipes and other pizza recipes, which actually outnumber the dough recipes.

By putting all the recipes on a single, scrollable page navigating through this app is a bit of a nightmare. To try and help make things easier the page has a search option, but that doesn’t work very well either. Part of the problem is that none of the recipe names are included to start each recipe, so when you scroll you don’t know where one recipe ends and the other begins. This app lacks so many things that it’s odd to find a hidden series of tools that allow you to take voice and written memos, adjust the font and other features that don’t solve the real problems with this app. Perhaps the most egregious error is the misspelling of “Recipes” in the opening screen (see image). Don’t buy this slice.

Toque Rating: 2.5/5

Order Pizza
Developer: Order Mapper LLC
Cost: Free
Runs on: iPhone, iPad, Android
Website: www.ordermapper.com

It seems that just about every pizzeria has their own app, which is great, but who wants a phone full of pizza apps? Order Pizza is the one app to rule them all by allowing you to order pizza from any joint in your area. When you open the app for the first time it asks for your location so it can load all the local eateries. It also asks for you to create a custom pin so that only you can order pizza from your phone.

You can view all the pizza places by list view, address or map view. It’s a very simple step-by-step process that leads you to ordering your pizza: from pickup or deliver, cash or credit, to all the details of your pizza toppings. You can even customize your pizza with certain ingredients on just half the pie. There are several drawbacks, however. First, you can’t order anything other than pizza. Second, you don’t get a price on what you’re ordering. Third, all the places include the same ingredients. If that weren’t enough, my list of places mistakenly included a local KFC and even allowed me to create a pizza (I didn’t try to place the order, though). Another feature they should add is a one-button order option for the family that always orders the same thing on Friday night. This app has a lot of potential, but it missing a few major features. Hopefully these will be included in their next update.

Toque Rating: 3/5

iPizza
Developer: Basis Information Technology
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone
Website: www.basisinformationtechnology.com

The app developer describes this app as a sort of tour guide for “Made in Italy” pizzas. In short, this app is a gigantic list of pizzas with a variety of interesting ingredient combinations. You can scroll through a list of pizzas by name or ingredient, and can also search for specific ingredients. For example, the Profumosa (or Salmone) pizza includes: baked ham, baked potatoes, grilled zucchini, mozzarella and tomato. iPizza is really well designed and easy to navigate. Each pizza also includes a nice color photo, although it doesn’t enlarge to full screen like Let’s Make Pizza! This is a pretty simple app that may provide the inspiration you’re looking for. Sometimes in apps, like pizza, simplicity is all you need.

Toque Rating: 4/5