Recipe apps are a dime a dozen in iTunes, but Nourished-Grain-Free Recipes has found a way to be different. First, the app is dedicated to grain-free recipes for folks on Paleo, Primal, GAPS™ or Weston A. Price dietary/lifestyle regiments. Second, the recipes in Nourished come from a handful of carefully selected, highly prominent food grain-free food bloggers. This means creative dishes, attractive food photos and delicious recipes from people who are passionate about their food. The creators of Nourished have combined your traditional recipe database with trusted sources of information to offer users tons of choices for nut-free, dairy-free, nightshade-free and FODMAP-free meals.
If you’ve recently started a special diet and need inspiring recipe ideas, Nourished will open your mind to a world of possibilities. Maybe you’re in a cooking rut, eating the same dishes over and over again? Nourished seeks to help you diversify your diet with over 92 healthy recipes. Get to know a new food blogger every month when new recipes are added. Search the recipe database using special diet filters. At a $4.99 price tag, Nourished is competing with the big boys. Can this mom and pop app deliver bang for your buck? Keep reading to find out.
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Getting Started
Launch the app and land on a simple, straightforward home screen. The weathered wood and slate-colored menu buttons give the app a warm, welcoming feel. It’s too bad you have to do a bit of digging to learn the story behind the app, because the family photo of Michele and Erik Spring is so heartwarming and their story lends a lot of credibility to the project. They should move this content to the forefront to make the app more sticky.
Launch the app and land on a simple, straightforward homescreen, left. Learn the story behind the app by reading the Spring family testimony, right.
Michele and Erik love food and share their testimony of how the GAPS™ diet benefited their son. Now they stick to a combination of Paleo- GAPS™-WAPF and want to help others looking to go grain free as well as make this lifestyle more mainstream. It’s a mom and pop shop — Michele wrote the code and Eric helped with graphics and photography. You can sense a real passion behind the project; it’s obvious the creators are seriously invested in the success of Nourished and they provide users with tons of support.
Navigating the Recipes
Select All Recipes and you can scroll through an alphabetized list of all 92+ dishes accompanied by a thumbnail photo. Initially the app seems minimalistic, but tap the search button and you’ll find a plethora of filters. Users will appreciate the ability to filter recipes by categories like No Egg, Nut, Dairy, Nightshade or Fodmap, as well as if the dish is freezable or portable.
The recipes section is pretty minimal, an alphabetized list of 92+ dishes, left. Tap the search button to apply filters, right.
The filter icons look smart, but below the menu filters for Course, Time and Season are a bit clunky looking, purely functional. They’re easy to use and they work, but this area could use a little love. Once you set the search criteria results display superfast, which is great, but the pop up notification telling you how many results have been found is annoying and I always find these a bit jarring.
Nourished in the Kitchen
Nourished contains a wide variety of recipes, from baked goods like cookies, scones, muffins and grain-free crackers to fresh vegetable soups and salads. You’ll find plenty of savory meat dishes like Chick and Vegetable Lo Mein, Fire Roasted Bacon Meatloaf and Honey Glazed Pork Chops. The food blogger angle brings in all sorts of clever ideas that will inspire you to get creative making your own riffs on the recipes.
Select a recipe to view an enlarged photo paired with a thoughtful introduction and icons to let you know its diet stats.
Tap on a recipe to see which food blogger contributed it and read a thoughtful intro, along with helpful tips, like Cara Comini’s suggestion to make a double batch of the Almond Flour Pumpkin Pie Muffins and freeze some to enjoy later. Special diets can be confusing, but Nourished keeps things simple with the easily recognizable icons depicting the stats of each recipe.
If a recipe can be doubled, there is a little tool for doing so quickly and changing all the ingredient counts, left. Instructions are easy to read and understand, right.
Ingredients lists are concise and easy to read from a distance. When I first saw the serving size calculator tool I was concerned, because not every recipe can simple be doubled and come out successfully. The tool for doubling recipes isn’t present for every dish though, so it looks as though each recipe has been looked at individually, which is reassuring. Recipe steps are straightforward and simple, which is great for less seasoned cooks.
That Special Touch
Occasionally you’ll come across features that let you know the people behind this app not only really care about the product, but they also use it themselves. Features like Cooked History and Cook Queue allow users to keep track of what dishes they want to make in the future and what recipes they’ve cooked already (and when). Home cooks will really appreciate those special touches in combination with the usual Favorites and Shopping Lists.
Instead of favoriting recipes you plan to cook, place them in your Cooking Queue, left. It’s helpful to be able to refer to your Cooked History for recipes you’ve made in the past, right.
You can also add your own notes to recipes. It’s too bad the Twitter and Facebook sharing options don’t let you share the recipe, they just announce to all your friends that you’re cooking a recipe from Nourished — a feature that doesn’t really seem to have user needs in mind.
Nourished recipes are sourced from a collection of food bloggers, who you can meet in The Bloggers section of the app.
I almost forgot to mention there’s a whole section of the app dedicated to the food bloggers. The app creators share each blogger’s personal story with the familiar ease of talking about an old friend. It’s nice to see the blogger and all of their recipes in one place.
Conclusion
Nourished-Grain-Free Recipes is a refreshing offering in a sea of recipe data base apps. It’s the personal touches that make this app unique, and the idea of a human being curating interesting dishes from inspiring food bloggers. I’m all for paying a price for apps, but $4.99 seems a bit high for Nourished. Accomplished cooks will be looking for more than Nourished delivers, but users with less kitchen experience will find plenty of material to enjoy. On the positive side, Nourished adds new recipes from a featured food blogger every month at no additional charge, so there’s the promise of more. It’s obvious Michele and Eric really care about this app, so hopefully they’ll continue to push the design and functionality to new heights, offering more value for money.
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