iPad cooking apps enter the kitchen

In early November, the recipe folders come out, along with dreams of learning to perfect a lattice pie crust, and the cookbooks covered with splatters and sticky notes that evoke holidays past.

Fast-forward two weeks, to the sweaty hours when the sticky notes have curled up and blown away, the cookbooks are taking up all the counter space, and the ‘Joy of Cooking’s’ illustrations for carving a turkey are revealed to be no more informative than they were in 1951.

If the people developing cooking apps for tablets have their way, that kind of scene will soon be a relic. And so will the whole notion of recipes that exist only as strings of words. Many early cooking apps were unsatisfying: slow, limited, less than intuitive and confined to tiny phone screens. Even avid cooks showed little interest in actually cooking from them.

But with the boom in tablet technology, recipes have begun to travel with their users from home to the office to the market and, most important, into the kitchen. With features like embedded links, built-in timers, infographics and voice prompts, the richness of some new apps – like Baking With Dorie from the baking expert Dorie Greenspan, Jamie Oliver’s 20-Minute Meals and the vast Professional Chef app released last month by the Culinary Institute of America – hint that books as kitchen tools are on the way out.

Numerous possibilities

The interface of a tablet offers possibilities to the cook that would be impossible with a laptop, let alone a book. Swiping, tapping and zooming through information presented in multimedia is a good match for the experience of cooking, which involves all the senses and the brain as well. And when those faculties fail, apps can come to the rescue with features like technique videos, embedded glossaries and social media links.

Bob Huntley wrestled with the limitations of the written recipe before founding his Houston-based software company called CulinApp. In the 1990s, Huntley had little time for cooking; he was busy building the network for Doom, the first international online gaming network. But after he sold that business and retired to a ranch outside the small town of Mason, Texas, he tried teaching himself to cook from cookbooks and online recipes. It didn’t work.“I struggled with getting the whole recipe downloaded into my head,” he said. “I would read the whole thing through, but pieces kept falling off. I needed a buffer,” he said.

Huntley was getting restless in retirement around the time Apple’s iPad was coming on the market. Accustomed to inventing alternate realities, Huntley developed ways of presenting recipes on a screen. These strategies can be disorienting at first, but make enormous sense. CulinApp’s first product was Baking With Dorie, the lively app from Greenspan, which was released this year.

Huntley is not the only designer thinking about new ways to represent recipes in visual form. “We are completely breaking these texts down to their data-rich components,” said Mark Douglas, a partner in Culinate, a food technology company in Portland, Ore., which produces apps for “How to Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman.

Many developers say that recipe animation, either employing stop-frame photography, line drawings or infographics, is the future of digital cooking instruction. Video, on the other hand, while it can be valuable for bringing a personality into the kitchen, has several drawbacks. Because there is so much video in Baking With Dorie, its mere 24 recipes pushed the app to the maximum data size allowed by Apple in the iTunes store. In contrast, the “How to Cook Everything”app, illustrated only with line drawings, holds 2,000 recipes.

Since the 1970s, arriving students at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., have been issued essential tools of the profession: chef’s whites, a set of knives and several heavy cookbooks. As of next June, they will also need a tablet loaded with the institution’s new app, The Professional Chef, a complete digital edition of the basic textbook the institute has published since 1962. In addition to reference materials and video, the app brings in networking ability and social media.

Nick Ahrens, a fresh-faced recent graduate who helped develop the app, was using it on the school’s campus last week to practice vegetable cuts, zooming in to compare his julienne carrots to the ones on the screen. Behind him, a current student, Alexis Lockwood, was feeding a wide ribbon of pasta dough through a roller, adroitly using one hand to hold it and the other to back up the video on her iPad, until the pastamaker’s handle fell off.