Tasty recipes at your fingertips
Of all mobile app users, home cooks may get the most value for the least money.
Many good apps are free on Apple and Android (like Epicurious and BigOven), and others offer recipes inexpensively, like the Food Network’s In the Kitchen, for $2 on Android and Apple, and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, which is $5 on iPhone and $10 on iPad.
Indeed, the excellence of such apps is one reason this category hasn’t been carved into as many niches as you’d find at the bookstore, assuming you can find a bookstore.
Take desserts, for example. Entire libraries could be assembled from dessert cookbooks, but in the app markets just a few notable ones exist, and the best ones are aimed at Apple device owners. Baking With Dorie ($13 for iPad) and Martha Stewart Makes Cookies ($3 for iPhone, $5 for iPad) are among the best dessert-specific entries, and they help point out why mobile apps have such a bright future in the kitchen.
Baking With Dorie features Dorie Greenspan, one of the best-known baking gurus. It’s quite good for beginning and intermediate bakers, but more accomplished bakers may feel cheated. That’s because Baking With Dorie includes just 24 recipes, including standards like chocolate chip cookies and brownies and more daunting dishes like tarte tatin and double-crusted blueberry pie. (For anyone without a calculator app, that’s 54 cents a recipe.)
Clear explanations
In Greenspan’s variation of Toll House cookies, for instance, the first section covers the basic set-up of ingredients. A text-based overview is accompanied by a one-minute video. The videos, produced by Geoffrey Drummond, an Emmy award winner, offer close-up views and clear explanations. Beneath the page’s text are two more video links, for tips on using the proper measuring tools and for accurately measuring flour. Like a lot of baking novices, I’d always failed to stir the flour in the container before scooping, and I’d also compressed the flour after scooping. Greenspan’s short video pointed out the failings of that approach and demonstrated the correct method.
For the record, the cookies were a hit in my household. One downside to the app is that because it contains three hours of video, it took about an hour to download on a high-speed connection. I’d suggest downloading it overnight so you don’t tie up your home’s bandwidth.
Stewart’s cookies app is less heavy on instruction, but it includes 12 videos that help guide cooks through some of the more complex recipes. More than 50 recipes are covered.
The app’s charm is, not surprisingly, in its presentation. The photos and text layouts are of magazine quality, and the cookies are divided into inviting categories. As in Baking With Dorie, the instructions are clear and effective. But you can’t pinch and zoom on the text.
Android has nothing like the Martha Stewart or Dorie Greenspan apps, but the broader cooking apps will do nicely. With the Food Network’s In the Kitchen, you’re essentially paying $2 for the right to find celebrity recipes. In the desserts section of the app, for instance, you can sort the 60 recipes to show those offered by a favorite cook.
You might expect some video tips from the Food Network, but they’re not here. Indeed, you can’t always expect a picture of the dish. I chose Mario Batali’s recipe, Two Carnival Desserts, partly because I wanted to see if his entry could rival the excellence of Mario Batali Cooks! ($10 on Apple). Not even close. There’s no photo, no video and the overview section says almost nothing about the dish, beyond the serving, prep and cook times.
Android phone and tablet owners who care little about the name of the recipe’s author will do better with the free apps. On this front, I’ve found Epicurious more consistently reliable than BigOven, although both are quite good.
On Epicurious I found a recipe for brown sugar berry cobbler that, according to the app, passed muster with 100 percent of the people who’d tried it. The steps were clear enough to follow, but in some places I would have loved to have seen some video. Epicurious told me to cut sticks of butter “into pieces.” How big would one cut pieces of butter for cobbler biscuits? Epicurious wasn’t saying.
Good thing I can call on Greenspan’s app for help.
