TasteBook Review

http://www.tastebook.com

Overall 4.00 of 5 (by 1 user)

Cat
Charlotte, NC

Have a Chef on your Christmas List? Look No Further!

married to a cooking enthusiast, married to a grill fanatic, an avid online shopper, into finding great deals online, married, a chow hound, a fan of cooking shows

Pros

reasonably priced, easy to use, easy to add recipes, easy to share books/recipes, friendly customer service, beautiful end product

Cons

relatively new & a little buggy, no way to just buy add'l recipes, can't modify recipes you import in

NOV

2007

It all started when I saw a website that offered published books, just a few weeks ago. That got me to thinking: Wouldn't it be great if I could publish a cookbook that consisted of only our family recipes? My husband loves to cook, and he frequently finds new recipes in the dozens of cookbooks we have cluttering our kitchen, but when we find a great recipe, it's hard to keep track of it. And then there's the "recipe drawer" which is a drawer in the middle of our kitchen island that has printouts of all of our favorite recipes that we've found online. It's a total mess. And then there are the family recipes! Like Mom's Mac-n-Cheese, which I make every Christmas, but which are also in a binder that's about to fall apart.

I wanted to publish all of these recipes in one place, but every site I found had limitations. I found a product called "Blurb" but the software kept crashing my computer. And a couple of other sites weren't much help either. Then I found TasteBook at http://www.tastebook.com.

About TasteBook
Like Charles Emerson Winchester, III, TasteBook does one thing. They do it well. And then they move on. TasteBook makes it easy for you, the home web surfer, to publish a customized cookbook with recipes of your choosing. But there's something special about TasteBook: They publish your recipes in a nice, hardbound binder. This means that you can add and change recipes within your TasteBook. This addresses a real problem with standard, published books - if your recipe collection is anything like mine, it's just an ever-changing snapshot in time. The thing I like most about TasteBook is that you can, at any time, add new recipes to your TasteBooks and get them mailed to you, to insert into your beautifully bound personalized TasteBook.

Another thing to note about the company is that they are brand new. TasteBook went live to the public roughly one month ago (October 2007), and as I discovered, there are still a few minor bugs to work out.

Using TasteBook
TasteBook's very easy to use, and it's a lot of fun. TasteBook has partnered with Epicurious, so if you have a recipe box on that site, you can import it into your TasteBook site. As of this writing, they do not have the same support for RecipeZaar or other recipe sites.

Once you sign up for TasteBook you can add your own recipes and create specific "TasteBooks". Or, if you'd rather, you can choose some of TasteBook's premade books, and customize them.

Each TasteBook you create costs $34.95 and comes with 100 recipes or recipe credits. The premade books have about 50 recipes in them already, to get you started. You just add 50 more. Or, you can create a brand new TasteBook and order it with as few as 30 recipes, and TasteBook will add the 70 remaining recipes as "credits" to your account. TasteBook will send you your book, complete with its cover design and tabs and the recipes you have added, and you simply add the remaining recipes later.

Each recipe "credit" is a page (or multiple pages depending on the length of your recipe) that TasteBook will print out and send to you. You only pay for shipping, which is $1.95 for 1-25 recipe credits. When you receive the credits, simply add them into your binder!

I found TasteBook's interface fairly intuitive, but it could use a little bit of work. Adding recipes is easy, but it's purely text-based, unlike some recipe sites where you can put in a quantity and then pull down to get the measurement. (i.e. enter 1 and then pull down for "cup"). The upside to this is that you can cut and paste recipes you have entered elsewhere easily. The downside is that if consistency is something that's important to you (as it is to me) you need to decide early on exactly what notations you'll use in your recipes.

Bugs
TasteBook is new, and it's not perfect. In fact if you visit the website you'll see a "Beta" notation right there under their logo. Here are a few bugs I encountered while using TasteBook:

Occasionally a recipe would show up two or three times, if I hit the save button more than once.
The "preview" option for TasteBooks doesn't always show the correct colors and headers for the section of the book the recipe is in. This may be a little disconcerting when previewing your book, but I noted that these tabs printed just fine in the real TasteBook I received.
I once logged into TasteBook to find I was somehow magically in the account of a person I had shared my TasteBook with! I have no idea quite what happened, but it was very disconcerting. I logged out of her account (no password or deeply personal information was available) but be forewarned: For the moment, only share a TasteBook with someone you know and trust.
When I received my TasteBook I noticed that some of the recipes, which have a MM/DD/YYYY line at the bottom, displayed oddly. Recipes that I had entered on November 20th (11/20/2007), showed up as 1½0/2007. I called support about the issue, and a real (local to the US) person answered in under a minute. She was knowledgeable and polite, and promised to look into the problem within 2 business days and reissue corrected recipe pages to me.

Other Limitations
You can't edit recipes you import from shared sources. This is a shame because I have a very specific format that I use for our family cookbook, and I wanted to edit those recipes to give it a seamless effect. And I always have notations for recipes I find online at Epicurious or RecipeZaar, where I adjust an ingredient or technique. You can always make a new personal recipe, and copy the shared recipe information into it so you can edit that, but that workaround kind of defeats the purpose of having shared recipes.

And additionally, you can only customize it so much. You can't change the pictures that they put on the tabbed sections, or change the tabbed sections themselves. And there's a limited selection of the photos you can use for your cover, which means you can't use a cute family photo.

But when it all comes down to it... the best thing about TasteBook is...

The Finished Product
My TasteBook arrived via USPS Priority Mail only a few short days after I ordered it. I created my TasteBook with 75 personal recipes, all entered in by hand. (That's one of the things that's kept me away from Viewpoints!) It is a gift for my husband (shhh!) and I was very excited to receive it.

The TasteBook itself is gorgeous. Its hardback cover is 8.5"x11" in size, with a nice wide spine. The print quality is excellent and the interior binding is solid and far superior to the three-ring binder I had been using. Because the cover and tabbed photos are pre-set and not customizable, it's very professional looking, which may be the reason you can't customize your cover or tab photos. The fonts are easy to read, and it's very exciting to flip through all of these family recipes and see them in such a professional looking book.

And there were other nice touches as well. Your TasteBook arrives in a color coordinated folio folder (at least I think it's color coordinated, mine certainly was) that's perfect for a gift. There's a very classy label that seals the folder as well, and it says:

Specially Prepared For
YOURNAME
Deliciously Yours,

TasteBook

Your TasteBook binder comes empty, with just the tabs. The recipes are bound with a strip of paper underneath and you add them to each section yourself. TasteBook uses this opportunity to add in a few Bertolli recipes on separate pages (nice partnership there!) which you can add in to your TasteBook if you choose.

Cat's Bottom Line
It's buggy, it has some limitations at the moment, but I love it. I am ordering several more TasteBooks for my family members, and I can't wait to give them these as Christmas gifts! TasteBook is very unique and the product itself is high quality. I highly recommend it for the 2007 holiday season, if you're willing to work through the few issues I mentioned above!

Last edited on Dec 06, 2007

TasteBook is recommended by Cat

Review inappropriate? Copyright violation?

add Cat to my friends list add to my favorites subscribe to feed

Comments about Cat’s Review

I was wondering if the images you can add yourself (the ones for each recipe) come out ok, or if they are distorted. It says in the FAQ section that the pics should be a certain size, but not all of the pics from recipe websites are. I would love to know your opinion, since you took one home!

Tastebook is good and I am using it right now. The disadvantage as I recently realized, all your recipes are locked on the web. If you are off the grid, you don't have any recipes at hand. Also, there is no way you can export your recipes from web interface (but you can import). Their business model won't allow them to develop a software program which will sync recipes online (More precisely, they won't spend their resources on it) These points are a major turn off from using tastebook.com If you have no such issues, its great (but the question is, do you REALLY want to keep your and your granny's recipes under such conditions, what if tastebook.com suddenly closes the door?)
Printing tastebook is a whole different story (but again, are you going to print all the recipes?)

Hi nice to see you:) Have a wonderful holiday season:) Jo
PS I'm trying and that's a big TRYING to keep my reviews short only because I think I'll be more apt to review them though that DVD is still eluding me. It gives me the evil eye wondering why I haven't reviewed it:)

What a find! Can't wait to try it out. Thanks for the review Cat.

Sounds like a great gift for my sister-in-law!

Cat, as usual you have outdone yourself with this review. I am heading over to the site now to see what trouble I can get into...

Vincent

I did a Tastebook too and agree with all the comments. The quality is unbelievable. This is going to be a great Christmas gift for all my family using our recipes, my man friends with all my favorite grill recipes and doing seasonal books. Love the way you can do a small amount of your own recipes and "gift" the rest to your recipient. The price point was amazing considering the ability to personalize. Most high-end regular cookbooks in the bookstores cost this much without the ability to personalize.