Lowcarbezine!

It's Mastercook!

I am SO excited! Mastercook is back on the market!

"What the heck is Mastercook?" I hear you cry. Mastercook is the cooking program that I use to analyze my recipes! Many people have written me, asking what program I used to calculate the carb counts for 500 Low-Carb Recipes and 15 Minute Low-Carb Recipes - but for a while there, I had to tell them that Mastercook was off the market. But it's back!

The folks who created it apparently sold it to another software company, you see, and it took the new company a little while to get it back on the market in an updated form. But Amazon is now carrying it again. Yippee!

I simply could not write my cookbooks without Mastercook. Before I had this program, I looked up every ingredient in every recipe by hand. If the quantity in the food count book was different than the amount in the recipe, I did the conversion for quantity. Then I added it all up, and divided by the number of servings. It was tedious, to say the least.

With Mastercook, I enter the quantity of each ingredient, tell it how many servings it is, click a button, and presto! I have a complete nutritional analysis, including not only protein, fat, carbs and fiber, but vitamins and minerals, too. If I'm adapting an existing recipe to lower the carb count, I can enter the recipe as I conceive of it, and see whether it comes out low carb enough. If it doesn't, I can make changes right then, easily, till I get numbers I can live with - and then I can try the recipe out.

But Mastercook does more than that. If you have a recipe that makes, say, 8 servings, and you want to make it for 12 (or for that matter, 6,) with a click of a button Mastercook will scale the recipe for you, and tell you how much you need of each ingredient.

Mastercook comes with a humongous data base of foods already in it, but also allows you to add new foods to it. This is quite easy to do - you just copy the information from the listing on the label. I've customized my Mastercook with Splenda, vanilla whey protein powder, Ketatoes, Atkins Bake Mix, and a number of other ingredients that are only common to the low carb cook. Makes my life much easier; I only have to enter the data once.

Add to this that Mastercook comes with 5000 recipes in it (not guaranteed to be low carb, of course) and you can see that this is a tool that every aspiring low carb chef needs.

You can get Mastercook through Amazon.com - that's where I got my copy of the old version. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0000ALX5X/lowcarbohysoluti

Posted by HoldTheToast at March 26, 2004 04:17 PM