Chef's Hat app for iPhone and iPad

Did you ever wonder how they come up with those wildly inventive and exciting dish combinations at great restaurants, like Cajun smothered pork loin with sage brown butter, shaved chestnuts, and San Marzano tomatoes? Well, I have no idea how THEY do it but you can use Chefs Hat. Its for professional chefs, restauranteurs, and anyone else in a kitchen who wants to come up with great ideas to excite one palate or a whole cityful.

Chefs Hat generates ideas semi-randomly from lists of 572 foods, 195 spices, 116 methods, 23 tastes, and 2173 food pairings.

Use the Mix button to randomize all 6 ingredients. When you find something that looks promising, use Stir to randomly change just one of the 6 at a time.

You can limit the main food item to meats, vegetables, or fruits.

If youve got a combination that is really promising, tap individual items to adjust that one item.

Want to start from a particular food, spice, or method? Tap that item in the ingredients lists.

Or perhaps you like one of the combinations you had a few minutes ago? Tap it in the History list to begin working from that starting point. The History list remembers the last 50 combinations.

Many of the more obscure spices and methods have definitions that appear on the list pages and at the bottom of the main screen. So you might learn a thing or two.

Chefs Hat has an option setting for left-handed users, flipping the main controls to the left.

And it has 5 instructional tips (3 on the main screen and one on Foods and History pages). They each appear once automatically and can be reset from the Options page.

Note that Chefs Hat includes over 2,000 sensible pairings for the main food items, but it is substantially a random tool. It is not intended as a "food designer." So it definitely will come up with crazy, unusable combinations along the way to some delectable morsels. Our feeling is that you wont come up with ideas like pumpkin-macadamia pesto if too much logic were programmed in.

Have fun and pass along your ideas to improve Chefs Hat.