CalCutter tries to help users find less caloric alternatives to their favorite recipes. After you enter the ingredients to any particular recipe, the app recommends alternatives with fewer calories — ideas that, in the best possible world, would taste just as good as the originals.
I was interested in how CalCutter might help me make peanut butter bars a mite less terrible for me than I know they are. An appealingly old-school interface allows users the option of creating and storing recipes. But entering the recipe for the bars was frustratingly time-consuming, maybe because I’ve become used to apps that do all the work for me.
Ingredients are searchable on a drop-down list, and the app allows users to add new ingredients and their calorie counts. This came in handy for graham crackers, which were not listed. But no peanut butter? Is it possible the superfood is so caloric that the app simply doesn’t list it on principle?
Looking up the calorie information for multiple ingredients was mildly irritating, but I thought it might be worth it if CalCutter could offer some way for me to bake the beloved bars without packing on pounds. No such luck.
Once I completed work on the recipe and pressed the magic button, the app gave me this advice: “Consider reducing amount of chocolate chips, semisweet; butter; peanut butter; and sugar, confectioner’s.â€
Removing even a smidgen of any of those ingredients would, of course, ruin everything. But it’s not only peanut butter bars that stump CalCutter. Recipes for Lebanese chicken and lentil stew similarly focused on calorie reduction above all else. Only when I put in the recipe for the Barefoot Contessa’s oven-fried chicken was I given advice that strayed from the “less food = fewer calories†template. And the suggestion to consider not frying the fried chicken was not particularly helpful.
CalCutter is a somewhat useful app for storing recipes and reminding yourself that maybe a single stick of butter will do. But in its single-minded focus on the amount of food that users are eating, CalCutter misses out on nutrients, diversity and other factors that contribute to a healthy diet.
It also discounts factors like the user’s weight and age, and it has not provided original healthful recipes of its own. Many apps look to own the space in which they operate, but CalCutter does not even succeed in thoroughly accomplishing its stated mission. It’s more of an ad for a tech-savvy governmental department than a useful piece of software.Â
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App CalCutter
Platform iOS 5.1 or later, Android 1.6 or later
Price Free
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