In case you were wondering what to do with your eggs...

Sometimes there's an iOS app that comes out that reflects a great, unique idea. And sometimes that great, unique idea gets thoroughly trashed in the implementation by whatever consulting company was assigned to create the iOS app and make sure it found its way to the App Store.

We can't say for certain that's exactly how it went, but this seems to be the case with Cooktorial, a cooking utility for the iOS in which you list any cooking ingredients you have on hand and the app searches through its database of over 1,000 recipes to see what you can make. If you have all the necessary ingredients, it'll provide a full recipe. For instances where you've listed only a portion of the ingredients needed for a recipe, the app will tell you what you need to pick up to complete the recipe as well as how to cook it.

Pick up a few things and you can have fresh pasta or poached eggs for your next meal.

Or this was probably the intended idea, anyway. In actuality, the app shoots itself in the foot on several levels. Cooktorial runs well and has a decent interface, but demands a $1.99 registration fee to perform unlimited searches as well as an additional $0.99 to remove persistent in-app ads. This feels a little unfair -- shouldn't paying the registration also remove the ads?

These shortcomings are compounded by weirdness in the app itself. Throw some basic ingredients its way, such as chicken and white rice, and Cooktorial will be unable to find a recipe that incorporates the two, even at their most basic levels. Try some other basic ingredients such as bread, eggs, and maple syrup, and the app will return strange default recipes such as soft-boiled eggs as opposed to the expected result of french toast, making one wonder what's going on in there.

Cooktorial is free to try, but has in-app purchases to unlock -- something the App Store description fails to mention.

The bottom line. Sadly, Cooktorial is an app that could have been great and tapped into the fact that people like to cook but don't want to have to haul out a recipe book or pull up a web site to figure out what to make for dinner. This could use a more comprehensive recipe list, and it'd be cool if it  hooked into Location Services to find nearby stores to purchase missing ingredients. Then maybe it'd be worth $1.99, a more honest App Store price.