Needs more salt

We treat cooking like a religion and recipes like scripture. But we can’t turn to any hotel nightstand to pull out our bible, so what happens to those recipes when we’re traveling around the world or just moseying to the kitchen? Yum 4 stores and organizes recipes on your Mac, even copying them to a free, companion iOS app. That means you can easily reference a MacBook or iPhone to make impromptu wasabi-and-edamame mashed potatoes while at a cousin’s for the holidays.

The simple, clean layout echoes our cooking, but Yum lacks any deeper flavors.

While it includes a few extra morsels, Yum focuses on storing your recipes. You’ll manually enter details, such as the dish’s name, keywords, and an ingredients list. Then you’ll give step-by-step directions and have room for notes at the end. Most of the fields work as expected, but we found problems right away, including wonky time fields and text bugs (which the devs claim they are working on). Cooks can quickly scale ingredients lists for bigger or smaller quantities, and you can also sync your recipe library to an iPhone or share your recipes with other Yum users. Unfortunately, Yum lacks crucial tricks like suggesting recipes based on available ingredients. And though Yum builds shopping lists, it creates new lists for every recipe instead of a single master shopping list.

Yum lacks the creativity and features serious cooks need. You can include a single, tiny thumbnail photo, but no additional images. The spellcheck only works on the highlighted field. There’s no undo option. Sigh. In the end, beginners might enjoy browsing recipes from other Yum users—or uploading their own—but there’s no reason to choose it over a cooking website, which has tons more recipes.

The bottom line. It’s okay for storing recipes, but Yum isn’t versatile enough for cooks obsessive enough to seek a dedicated recipe application.