Great Gourmet

A GOURMET CD TO TICKLE YOUR PALATE!

A Review of Great Gourmet

by Susan Davis

With the flood of multimedia CD-ROMs available these days, it would be

easy for the few quality titles to get lost in the shuffle. Great

Gourmet by Expert Software is more than just another copy-cat recipe

program trying to undercut the higher priced, higher visibility

programs on the market. Great Gourmet has all the quality of a

seven-course restaurant meal, but offered at a price even a budget

gourmet would jump at. Great Gourmet is caviar tucked away in a tuna

fish can.

The packaging is nothing special to look at, and your first impression

as you open the CD-ROM is that this is truly a budget program. The

type you buy because you can’t justify the price on the really neat

looking program farther over on the shelf. But once you take a few

moments to run the exceptionally easy Install routine and open this

program, the budget label in your brain vanishes forever, and you’ll

never look at those other programs again.

The first thing that you realize as you look at Great Gourmet is how

easy the interface is to handle. You probably won’t even get around to

looking at the manual (and it’s a nice one, although small), because

it’s too easy to jump in and start exploring the recipes with the

well-labeled icons for Back, Print, Shopping, Meal Plans, Recipe

Contents and so on.

Speaking of recipes, you’ll be amazed in that respect, too. Great

Gourmet boasts of over 10,000 recipes, and it’s no empty brag. And

we’re not talking about seventeen recipes for chicken soup, either.

With dozens of cookbooks to choose from, and a wide range of

categories in each one, you have a marvelous blend of homey and

gourmet recipes compiled together. If you’ve always wanted to try a

new recipe for Taco Dip, Great Gourmet has one. And if you’ve ever

dreamed of cooking dinners that sound as good as they taste, you could

try Heavenly Bangkok Chicken or Bird of Paradise. For chocoholics, the

chocolate cookbook will keep you engrossed for weeks on end with

delicacies like Marvelous Mocha Brownies or Sex in a Pan.

If the recipes alone aren’t enough to make you drool, the pictures

that accompany many of them are bound to push you over the edge. I

installed Great Gourmet right after a big dinner, and my mind was far

from food, but ten minutes with those pictures, and I wanted to rush

back into the kitchen and start cooking up a storm. For those you

interested in cooking from a more healthy perspective, Great Gourmet

will have its hooks in you, too. The nutritional information and

analysis, available by either graph or numerical data, is at least as

good as what I’ve seen in programs like MasterCook II, and much better

than some other programs I’ve sampled.

Like some of the more expensive recipe programs, you have a variety of

options available to you. You can enter new recipes into cookbooks,

and mix and match recipes from one cookbook into another. You can edit

recipes, and you can print recipe cards or shopping lists for recipes.

You can even scale the recipe to fit your own needs. The meal planning

feature is slick, too, and the sorting features for the recipe lists

are more varied than any I’ve ever seen before.

You can sort by

everything from name, to total calories, to percentage of the recipe

calories from fat, to the amount of cholesterol or sodium in the

recipe. You can even sort them out by the time it takes to make the

recipe, or the prep time involved. And, if you already have an

investment in another recipe program that you want to switch from, the

Import and Export features in Great Gourmet are quite extensive for a

budget program.

With all of the features available in Great Gourmet, it has the

capacity to tickle the palate of even the most demanding users. It’s

easy to use, inexpensive, the content has all of the quality of a

five-star multimedia CD, and you get a menu of features that rivals

any cookbook program on the market. Plus, with such tantalizing

recipes and appetizing pictures of food, you’ll soon be inspired to

create kitchen masterpieces that will have everyone you know asking

you for the recipe!

Multimedia Cafe Scorecard

Product:	Great Gourmet
Company:	Expert Software 800 Douglas Road Coral Gables, FL 33134 (800) 759-2562 (305) 567-9990 (305) 569-1111 (FAX)
Cost:	$19.95

System Requirements:

PC-Compatible 386DX or higher,
running DOS 3.3 or higher

with Microsoft Windows 3.1 or higher,
4 MB RAM, 256-color VGA or SVGA, CD-ROM,
15 MB of hard drive space, and a Windows-supported mouse.

Breakdown:

Entertainment Value 4
Educational Value 4
Concept 4
Depth 5
Interface 5

Overall Score: