MasterCook Deluxe 7 - 5,000 delicious recipes

by ValuSoft

Product Features

• MasterCook Deluxe 9.0

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• ASIN: B0000ALX5X
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 11, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,946 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #47 in Software > Home & Hobbies > Cooking & Health

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

With MasterCook Deluxe 7's 5,000-plus easy-to-follow recipes, you'll get your fill of mouth-watering appetizers, delicious entrees, and tantalizing desserts. Compile all of your favorite recipes in one convenient, central place. You can add your own notes and photos, print out recipes to share with friends, or even send them via email. Keep track of fat, calories, sodium, cholesterol, and more with the instant nutritional analysis. You can even accommodate special dietary needs for vegetarians and diabetics and those with hypertension, food allergies, and low-carb requirements. Now menu planning is as easy as clicking your mouse--whether you plan one meal or one week in advance.

Recipe scaling will help you instantly adjust recipes to fit your family and entertainment needs. Best of all, the program automatically generates shopping lists for you to print out or download to your Pocket PC and Palm OS handhelds. Never forget an ingredient again--professional chefs and culinary experts give you expanded information on cooking methods and fundamentals, time-saving tips, and even insight into special techniques in step-by-step instructional videos. Special bonus: the software now includes recipes from the "Food for Fifty & On" cooking textbook of culinary fundamentals.

Product Description

It's a challenge to find time to create new meals for you and your family. With MasterCook Deluxe 7.0, life in the kitchen just got a whole lot easier. Includes 5,000+ recipes, grocery lists, and much more!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

105 of 108 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Out to make a buck..., June 7, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: MasterCook Deluxe 7 - 5,000 delicious recipes (CD-ROM)

I guess you could say I'm a cooking software aficionado. I've been watching this industry for many years. I've seen products come and go.

MasterCook is a pretty good product but since Sierra sold it to ValuSoft a couple years ago, my confidence in it has declined significantly.

ValuSoft is just out to make a buck. The only technical support they offer is via e-mail. They are milking the brand for all it's worth and when they can't get anything else out of it, they will discard it like they have done with all their other old titles.

It's not that they're a bad company, that's just their business model. They buy old products that have some value, they repackage them so they look "new and improved" and sell them at deep discounts until they don't sell anymore. They're not truly committed to the cooking software category.

"As long as the software works well, what does it matter?" is probably what you're thinking right now, right? That's what many people thought before Windows XP came out. But they were very sad to find that their MasterCook software did not work on Windows XP. After spending hours and hours entering their own recipes they suddenly found that they were unable to run the MasterCook program on their new Windows XP computers.

Over a year later, Sierra fixed the compatibility problem in order to sell the product to ValuSoft but what happens when the next Operating System comes out?

Before you spend a lot of time entering in your own recipes into MasterCook, I highly recommend that you take a look at some of the other options out there.

In my opinion, the Cook'n Software by DVO is the best. The interface is a bit dated but the company is totally committed to cooking software. They are constantly enhancing the software and they post updates regularly and let you download them for free.

There are some other good products on the Internet as well like the Living Cookbook but they're not as secure as DVO. They're relatively new and still have yet to prove themselves.

That's my opinion...for what it's worth. I hope this helps somebody. It's probably more than you ever wanted to know...but when you consider the amount of time it takes to key in all those recipes, I figure it's better to get the scoop up front rather than find out after the fact.

Whatever you decide to do, organizing your recipes on the computer is FAR better than any other paper method. If you've never tried an electronic cookbook before, you're going to LOVE IT!

110 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I have concerns with this company & this product, July 14, 2004

By 

Sandi Hultman "SandiDandi" (Coon Rapids, Minnesota United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MasterCook Deluxe 7 - 5,000 delicious recipes (CD-ROM)

This is essentially the review I posted for their sister-product, MasterCook Deluxe Low Carb. I've spent 3 days researching the heck out of cooking software, and maybe I can save you some effort ... or at least give some food for thought. I want to upgrade from my 3.5" disk of MasterCook II (2.7) version from 1993.

Sierra sold the MasterCook line to ValuSoftware a few years ago, a company with questionable practices based on all the internet research I've observed recently. A lot of what I've read indicates that if you decide to go with MasterCook, you're better off springing for the two bills more and getting MasterCook Deluxe, not the LowCarb version of it. Deluxe has everything that LowCarb has (except 11 recipes that are only in LowCarb), plus thousands of regular recipes, should you ever need one. You can filter Deluxe to return just the Low Carb recipes results. It appears the LowCarb product was a fast remarketing ploy by ValuSoft to make some quick bucks on current trends, without hardly doing anything but filtering existing software.

I've also read on the internet that ValuSoft tends to buy up software, sell it cheap, sell it only until the sales decline, then abandons the product. It doesn't sound like much is ever done for future enhancements. Not good, if it's true.

Of significant note for me as a low carber of over 5 years, before it got trendy, is that the MasterCook line doesn't break out sugars from the carb nutritional analysis reporting.

I'm strongly considering "Living Cookbook" instead, a much newer program, but with some really active development going on, and easy communication with the actual software developer. There's an online demo I checked out, a free 25-use trial, and continual updates for no extra fee (even entire whole number version updates). It reports carbs, net carbs (and sugar, sugar alcohol and fiber). It looks pretty attractive to me. (I don't think it can be any riskie than going with ValuSoft's MasterCook program at this point.)

Alternatively, there's another line you might look at ... Cook'n, which offers a low carb version that's probably better than what MasterCook has to offer as far as the recipes offered anyway.

MasterCook has a huge following, but I don't know that it can be sustained now that it's under the control of ValuSoft ... or if it will be around for long. I'd be ... CAUTIOUS, if you intend to invest a lot of time into cooking software data entry.

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Much More Than a Recipe Database, February 21, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: MasterCook Deluxe 7 - 5,000 delicious recipes (CD-ROM)

Although it's not a replacement for recipe "books", this is a great tool if you collect recipes from the Internet, or need to analyze the nutritional contents of a recipe. You can also scale recipes, add your own ingredients including nutritional values, print shopping lists, search recipes by ingredient, create your own cookbooks, and categorize recipes.

There is also a daily meal planner. You can input what you ate all day, and the program will tell you the nutrition values of a particular meal, or for the entire day. This comes in handy if you're on a diet, or you need to watch intakes such as calcium, iron or B12.

Highly recommended!