Most of us claim to be foodies, without realizing that actually cooking your own food is part and parcel of said title. Lack of skill, patience and ultimately, lethargy, usually win when it comes to sustaining oneself. Every once in a while, however, something comes along that changes that. For some, it could be an enforced absence of one’s mother or wife. For me, it was the launch of Basil 2.0 on the App Store.
Basil is a recipe aggregator. Think of it as Ember for your kitchen. To add new recipes to the app, you can use the ‘Add to Basil’ Safari bookmarklet that the developer has included, although it is a bit crude to set up and use. I’d recommend you use the excellent in-app browser and simplify your life. Basil has a large number of ‘supported sites’ – i.e., websites like Epicurious that the in-app browser can easily parse the recipe, ingredients and photos from. Of course, you can visit other sites and parse data from them, too, but results may vary. Once you’ve found the recipe you want, you tap the ‘Save’ button. The app then allows you to tag the recipe by 'Meal' and 'Cuisine' if you wish. Which brings us to Basil's biggest strength – Organization.
Basil has a fantastic sorting technique. Not only does it allow you to sort by the Meal Type and Cuisine, it also automatically scans the ingredients and creates tags for them, too. So you could find a Chinese Main Course Meal containing Pork in three taps. Of course, regular text search, as well as searching by source, work just as well. You can also set Favorite recipes. This slick organization is absolutely magnificent to use, and it even works for recipes that you enter into the app manually.
Finally, Basil's excellent design extends to supporting you while cooking as well. Once you've selected the dish you want to make, Basil makes use of the iPad's ample screen real estate to display the ingredients and the steps to follow in a big, smooth typeface. You can cross off the ingredients you've added by tapping on them. Basil supports native unit conversions as well. And if your recipe contains any mention of time (such as 'Steam for 10 minutes'), it turns into a tappable link, and a timer which you can actually start within the app itself shows up. When the timer is over, Basil will alert you. You can even run multiple timers, so you can actually be working on multiple dishes at once. You also have options to add notes, share the recipe via Mail, Twitter or Facebook, edit the recipe yourself, delete the recipe and set it as a favorite within the Recipe view.
If there was one tiny fly in the otherwise gourmet soup that is Basil, it would be that the parsing isn’t perfect yet. If ingredients are divided into, say, ‘Frosting Ingredients’ and ‘Cake Ingredients’, the app doesn’t parse them under separate headings as they are depicted on the website, but rather clubs them together. This makes following the instruction “Mix the Frosting Ingredients together” difficult, to say the least. It’s a minor issue and might be easily rectifiable, but it did stump this amateur chef.
Basil makes cooking something I can look forward to, and I never thought I'd catch myself saying that. I really am inspired by the sheer level of attention to detail that the developer, Kyle Baxter, has put in to it. You can easily tell that it's a labour of love. It may not be enough to turn you into Gordon Ramsey, but you certainly have fun trying. Basil is a steal at $2.99 on the App Store.