Extremely unstable, tested on multiple systems and OS X versions

Really liked this application when it was first released, however i'm now seriously considering switching to a different recipe management solution at the rate of development on SousChef is almost non existent!!
The program is full of bugs which have never been addressed by the developers, almost no new features have been added in the last 2 years, and it now crashes over 50% of the time when used in Lion.. It is very disappointing, as it originally showed a lot of promise and could have been developed into a first class application if given some or any support! :o(

SousChef works good for me. In comparing it with another Mac recipe program, this one was easier and had better features. It took a bit for me to figure it out but that is standard for most programs. The photo is great, and I use it a lot, but wish it was removable as well. When you want to print the recipe, you don't want that black box if there is no photo. When I contacted the developer about this I got a quick response, but found I'd have to copy and paste to TextEdit if I don't want the box. It's a bit ugly and hey, uses more black ink, right?

I got this program with MacHeist.

While it has a clever recipe import feature, it makes a lot of mistakes when identifying ingredients. "Kosher" is not an ingredient, darnit (it's "Kosher salt"). When a recipe calls for garlic cloves, I don't want to see "cloves" added to my shopping list. No matter how many times I corrected it, it never learned. I got tired of correcting every ingredient and so was never able to use the shopping list feature.

I have around 150 recipes in Yojimbo, but the process of importing them and correcting the ingredients took so long that I gave up.

The program also caused me to lose data in another program, TextMate, because of its Services shortcut key (Shift-Cmd-R). I accidentally pressed that key combination while TextMate had a file dialog open. SousChef appeared unexpectedly and TextMate locked up.

If I was starting a new recipe library from scratch, I would probably give SousChef another try. I liked the large-print display that I could easily read when my computer was sitting on the other side of the kitchen. The recipe search function was intriguing. It was fun to see what recipes other people have in their libraries (of course you can turn off sharing if you want to). I could not get the speech recognition to work, but I think that is a problem with my Mac, not with SousChef. It's a great idea if it works as advertised.

I am a registered user, and overall really like the concept and much of the execution. Sadly, I find the search function to be almost useless.

Search does not do partial text searches, so for example:

if I have two recipes, one of which calls for "buffalo stew meat" and another of which calls for "buffalo or bison," searching for "buffalo" yields no results.

Thus, you must know the /exact/ name of any ingredient you want to search for, and since there is no component to normalize ingredient names, I can't effecively search through my own (or online) recipes. In an email, the developer did indicate that he would look into this for a future version, but in the meantime, sadly, I'll have to resort to another tool.

Great idea, and well executed - but as soon as you try and enter your own recipes is when the bugs start to appear. Adding ingredients and directions goes very smoothly if you do it in order without making any mistakes. But as soon as you want to insert directions or ingredients, reorder them or delete them is where this app suffers. I have too often lost steps entirely when deleting or re-ordering a direction. Sometimes 2 items disappear, sometimes the wrong item gets deleted. The same issues are with the Ingredients but I've found the best way to work around this is to just add ones you forgot to the end instead of messing with the order and risk losing any. You can get away with this with the Ingredients but unfortunately not with the directions because you NEED them to be in the right order.

When you're working on entering a recipe with over 10 ingredients and steps, it's very easy not to notice when one goes missing. For this alone I have to rate this application a 3/5. Another issue I found when creating a grocery list, I typed up the whole thing and clicked Print. The pinwheel spun for about 30 minutes before I force quit the application. When I re-launched, none of the items in my grocery list had been saved and ended up re-typing up the whole list in Text Edit.

The online portion works pretty well, and it's a great way to find new recipes and share some of your favourites, just as long as you manage to enter them in correctly.

To be honest, because this database is largely (if not all) community driven, with the amount of problems I've experienced entering in my own recipes, I can only imagine that other people may have run in to the same thing and maybe didn't notice, and therefore there could be recipes published in the online database with ingredients and steps missing.