I have a fairly large collection of books about food, and also a couple of folders of things photocopied, printed and handwritten, from friends, the internet and my own creations.

In amongst the thousands of recipes contained in that lot there are some that I love, some that I think need a bit of work, and some that I can easily dismiss, either having cooked and not been impressed by simply not needing to.

In order to make some sense of all of this, I’ve been looking for a piece of recipe management software. Something that will let me enter details of all my favourite recipes, edit them as I experiment, and then sort and search through them in a way much easier than pulling book after book off the shelf and flicking through the indexes.

Just a quick note: I use a Mac, so if you are using a PC then you might as well stop reading this post now (or a better option, go to the apple store and switch).

So far I’ve tried out three options, Dishbase, MacGourmet and Yummysoup! Of the three, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind which is the best. Yummysoup! offers some additional features which can’t be found in the other programs, i.e. a fantastic web import interface that makes it stupidly easy to import your favourite recipes from any site on the web. As well as this it gives you a good looking and intuitive user interface, and is very simple to learn and use. The full screen recipe view is very handy, but I would prefer it if I could turn the picture off, and have just the text.

Yummysoup! is available at hungryseacow.com, for $20 (about £10.50), and you can download a free 15 day trial, I’d highly recommend giving it a go.

Of course the ideal solution would be to create my own database using something like the fanstastic Bento and tailor it exactly to my needs, but at the moment I just don’t have the time. Until I do, yummysoup! does pretty much everything that I ask of it.