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Culinary fortitude is not merely creating extravagant or exotic food. It’s not just the massive amount of hours you’ve spent on Foodgawker and TasteSpotting drooling over perfectly photographed morsels set on pretty little dishes. It goes far beyond the fact that you can, or know of someone who can, eat a raw bird’s eye chili and not have to drink three glasses of cold milk afterward. Culinary fortitude comes down to numbers. At Wolfram|Alpha, we do numbers best. And because we’re awesome (and loaded with culinary fortitude), we created the Wolfram Culinary Mathematics Reference App.
This app is broken down into eight different categories: Nutrition; Unit Conversion; Recipe Size Conversion; Decimals, Fractions, & Percents; Purchasing Quantities; Calculating Cost; Store Locator; and Food Economics. Seriously, we’re giving you just about everything you could possibly want from the mathematical side of food without actually setting a slice of your favorite freshly baked pie in front of you.
Let’s talk about nutrition. We’ve already shown you how you can lose weight with Wolfram|Alpha, but with this new app, you’ll be able to look up, compare, and calculate the nutritional values of single foods or entire meals. You can enter up to four foods at once—protein, vegetable, carb, drink. A well-balanced meal!
Since there’s a lot of variance in the preparation of different foods, you’ll need to use words like “raw,” “prepared,” and “fried” in your query. We can’t give you the nutritional facts for “the perfect steak” because that’s not technically computable (someone’s perfect steak is rare and well-seasoned while another’s is most definitely not mooing and covered in steak sauce), but we can give you the stats on cooked zucchini with mushrooms and onions.
We’ve got you completely covered when it comes to numerical conversions in your culinary adventures. Want to quadruple your recipe and all you’ve got to measure with are tablespoons? You can use the “Recipe Size Conversion,” “Decimals, Fractions, & Percents,” and “Unit Conversion” categories to get the right measurements. Other than the fact that your wrist will get sore from pouring hundreds of tablespoons of various ingredients into a bowl… no worries! That banana bread won’t turn out like a clumpy bowl of pudding and taste like feet. You could even call it tablespoon bread and wow all your friends with your spectacular culinary fortitude.
This app isn’t just about how to convert recipes and calculate nutrition facts, though. It can help with waste management and budgeting. The American Farm Bureau Federation’s survey states that the average Thanksgiving turkey dinner of 2011 (including all the fixings) costs around $49.20. Now, if Aunt Rose added too much salt to the green beans, the turkey was a bit dry, and those crazy cousins Joey and Frankie had a mini food fight with the mashed potatoes, you could reasonably assume that about 25% of the food went to waste because of bad decision-making skills. What did that really cost you? An extra $16.40, that’s what. Dinner actually costs $65.60 due to the waste. Aunt Rose can bring the cranberry sauce next year.
You can calculate the “edible portion quantity” or figure out how much of that 3-lb roaster chicken you’d have to use to make sure you aren’t wasting more than 15% (that equals 2.55 lbs of chicken-y goodness).
Maybe you don’t know where to go to get that roaster chicken? The Culinary Mathematics app will even help you with that. Go to the Store Locator and search for grocery stores by location or by name. Use your device’s GPS, and we’ll give you the address, phone number, and a map for the closest one to you as well as a list of names and locations for other ones nearby.
And just for good measure, we included a section on Food Economics, because who doesn’t want to know the average cost of beer at the turn of the century from coast to coast?
When it comes to culinary math, we’ve got you more than covered. We’ve got you radiating with culinary fortitude. And it’s only $1.99. Double awesome.