Demy

The Demy arrived at my house at the end of March and I finally got around to really playing around with it this past week.  The Demy is gadget/device (sort of looks like an old school Sonos player) that holds all of your recipes in it.  Instead of on paper, you can store everything in the Demy.  A kindle for recipes.

I plugged it in immediately, charged it up and checked out the recipes and information that had already been loaded in.  Pretty user friendly and a variety of nice additions for cooking.  A conversion table, a timer, cookbook features, categories and more.  A quick scan through the recipes and then I let it hang out in the kitchen for a while.  Every day I looked it and felt guilty about not being able to find the time to play. 

Last week, I finally got around to really playing with the Demy.  First of all, the device sits nicely on your kitchen counter.  Although everything these days seems to be built on an ipod, I am not sure I’d want that for the kitchen.  First of all, the Demy stands up, is water proof and is a better size for kitchen use.  At least I think so. 

I connected the Demy to Key Ingredient and downloaded the software on to my laptop.  A nice feature is that the recipes available through Demy can be edited so if I play around with a recipe for my tastebuds, I can make the changes permanently where on a paper recipe I just make notes with a pen.

As a whole, I like the concept.  I am sure many people will buy the device and just use the recipes provided.  For me, I have collections of recipes that I have pulled out over the years in a huge binder.  I also own many cookbooks which as time goes on, I rarely use.   I would probably prefer a Demy to come complete blank and let me slowly fill in my recipes.  Pull recipes off of Amazon, Tastespotting or even Key Ingredient.  Perhaps in the future, as people write cookbooks, like music, you can just buy a page (like a song) to download on to your device.  I know that the people at Demy are working on that with a few companies now. That would be fantastic.

One thing that I noticed with my cooking habits, is that they have changed over the years.  I used to pour over my cookbooks and I never do that anymore.  I definitely pull recipes off the different sites to make.  I still love when Food and Wine, Gourmet, Bon Appetit or Saveur shows up in my mailbox.  Based on the size of ads in these magazines ( and others ), I am becoming a shrinking audience.  More than likely I will make one thing out of the magazine or at least it will provide some inspiration.  As much as I applaud the Demy, and I can see it being a great tool for so many people and certainly a tool for now, I wonder how much I will use it.  I could send them all of my pages and pages of recipes to scan and download for my own use but the cost would be exhorbitant.  If there was a way to do it on my own, I might spend a few days on a large project.  Only time will tell.  Conceptually I love the idea of all of my recipes on my Demy.  I'd rather go through Gourmet once a month and pull the recipes I want and store them in my Demy vs my exploding 3 ring binder.   It would certainly be easier.

I do know, thanks to the owner of Demy, who gets a huge thank you for sending me one to play with, that they are starting to get reorders for larger quantities and take off.  I applaud their efforts.  Making a device with software is not a cheap start-up.  All the of the things that I want from the device is being worked on.  It might be worth creating different applications for different consumers.  One person might want all the recipes that comes with the product, others might not or others ( like myself ) might want the ability to pick and choose before the device is delivered to my door.  You buy the Demy empty and once you make the connection to Key Ingredient, you get to choose what you want in your device and that comes with the purchase.  If I could go online and go to Amazon or Gourmet.com and download my favorite stuff to create a base to layer on top of, that might be even more interesting and certainly fun and interactive to get me started. 

An interesting product.  I just want it to be filled with my stuff sooner than later.