Food App Review of the Week: Best Jam Recipes

Best Jam Recipes
Developer: Lazy Yards
Cost: $0.99
Runs on: iPhone, iPad
Website: www.lazyyards.com

Earlier today I was outside picking fresh blueberries and raspberries. When all the delicious fruits and vegetables of summer ripen, it can be a struggle to use them all before they go rotten. Of course, you could make some thick, sweet jam.

Best Jam Recipes from Lazy Yards is a recipe app for various types of jams—both in ingredients and cooking technique. The app contains four main navigation options: Recipes, Bookmarks, Search and Facebook. Facebook allows you to talk about your jams and Bookmarks is a place to save your favorite (or want-to-try recipes).

Recipes is where nearly all the action is at. It offers six jam options, including: fruit jam, vegetable jam, no cook jam, microwave jam, mixed jam and other jam. There are around 100 jam recipes ranging from very standard strawberry or blueberry jams to rhubarb orange jam and pumpkin raisin apricot jam.

Click the recipe you’d like to make and you’re presented a nice picture of the final product, an ingredient list and a set of instructions. Since these aren’t complicated recipes or procedures, these pages don’t have a lot going on. One complaint I have with the recipe page is that there is a lined background image on which the text sits, but it doesn’t line up properly. This page allows you to adjust the text size bigger and smaller (only adjusting the instructions, not the ingredient list), but nothing seems to make the text fall on the lines properly.

Other options on the recipe pages include the button to add the recipe to your Bookmark page, as well as an option to e-mail the recipe—picture included.

The last main feature of this app is the Search page. This is a real time search that adjusts the results as you type—and it works very well. Not only does it index the recipe titles, but also ingredients; so searching for tomato gave me both green tomato jam and eggplant jam, which includes three tomato wedges in the recipe. This is a great feature for when you visit your garden or fruit tree and don’t want to sift through recipe after recipe trying to find what to do with all your zucchini (yep, there’s a zucchini jam recipe).

Overall the app is pretty basic and doesn’t contain a lot of bells and whistles. Navigating through the app is very easy and the design is okay, but nothing more. If you’re interested in making jam I’m guessing you’ll be very pleased with this app, although you shouldn’t expect videos or any other new media content. Put simply, this app is  nice jam recipe guide for your pocket, which is perfect for me since I’m visiting family and don’t have my cookbooks with me. Now I just need to find where they put the sugar.

Toque Rating: 3.5/5