America's Test Kitchen

I’ve been a fan of and user of America’s test kitchen and cooks illustrated etc… resources for 25 years. I’ve had a subscription to the app for five or six years and I highly recommend it for the value it offers providing a searchable digital repository of recipes from across the related publications. I’m giving it four stars instead of five because there are some areas for improvement that remain unaddressed despite regular updates throughout the time I’ve been user. I’m hoping sharing this will help set other user expectations and perhaps inform product enhancements: Opportunity areas: 1) bugginess: mainly that the app crashes more frequently than what I would expect 2) search functionality: while I can usually find what I’m looking for it seems there’s an opportunity for enhanced search, both in the search algorithms, and in allowing for more complex search instructions/criteria and/or natural language search 3) content gaps: sometimes recipes that reference illustrations of techniques, don’t have the associated images from the publications, sometime recipes reference other recipes but the secondary recipe isn’t readily available, sometimes recipes don’t have any images at all, many recipes don’t have the explanatory/learning content associate with the recipe that first got me into ATK and cooks illustrated 4) menu development/ dish accompaniment support: it would be nice if there were better recommendations for what goes with what, or ways to use the knowledge base to build menus. 5) genAI enabled comment review/summaries: would be nice to more easily get a sense of what other users are saying about a particular recipe beyond the rating

This pie may be a bit more labor intensive than the “standard” type of pumpkin pie we all are accustomed to BUT it is so worth it!! Just follow the directions and you will be fine. I recommend thoroughly reading through the recipe well ahead of time so you can budget your time for the preparation of the crust and pie filling. For example, I am making the crust thru the disk stage and refrigerating on the Monday before Thanksgiving. I will be completing the pies on Wednesday the day before Thanksgiving. I find this really speeds things up and there is a lot less to clean up at one time. An aside… I made three of these pies for a bake sale. One was purchased by a person I know. He called me two days later absolutely raving about it being the very best pumpkin pie he had ever eaten. He then told me he had taken a slice to an aunt that was a retired pastry chef. She was so impressed and couldn’t believe it had been made by a home baker because she also said it was the very best pumpkin pie she had ever tasted… I think she would know! Trust me, this is an excellent recipe and turns out beautifully every time. I find all ATK recipes to be reliably dependable. I rely on their cookbooks for everything.

I am so glad they made so many improvements to their app. The only issues I have now are not being able to share the shopping list across my iPhone and iPad. Everything else shares just not the list. Found that out by putting the list on my iPad and taking my phone to the store. No list. Meh. Also I can’t delete many items on the shopping list as I’m going through the store. It makes that feature almost useless. All that aside I love the app and I love ATK. Been a subscriber for many years. I use this app like a used to use Mealime. I pick out a week of meals and create a collection. Put all the ingredients in my shopping list and eliminate the things I already have on hand. If the shopping list worked like it’s supposed to it would be really cool. I use it anyway and grumble a lot. Please please fix that because everything else is amazing. ❤️❤️❤️