After 13 years writing ?The Minimalist? column for the New York Times and hosting a PBS television series, Mark Bittman has established himself as a guru of the American food scene. Home cooks across the country keep a tattered copy of his ubiquitous big red book, How to Cook Everything, close to hand in the kitchen for daily reference. If you?re looking to understand a cooking technique or digging for inspiration to jazz up your weekly roast chicken, you?ll find it in this epic cookbook, containing 2,000 recipes and 400 technique illustrations.
The developers at Culinate have taken this classic cookbook and turned it into a must-have recipe app, How to Cook Everything for iPhone. It?s a companion to the book because it allows users to engage with the content using advanced search features, rate recipes and view the most popular ones, plus create customizable Favorites and Shopping Lists.?Keep reading to learn more about the ultimate cook?s reference for recipes and techniques.
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Getting Started
How to Cook Everything for iPhone is not meant to replace the five-pound hardcover cookbook, but rather, to compliment it. Therefore, it?s easier to use the app if you?re familiar with the cookbook (but not essential). Having a copy of the book on hand is good when you?re in the mood to sit down and read in-depth, exploring technique guides and recipe variations. You?ll reach for the mobile app instead as a quick-reference for searching through the thousands of recipes by ingredient, technique, cuisine and other filters. It?s handy for grocery shopping on the fly or gaining access to your favorite recipes when cooking away from home.
The home screen offers several ways to engage with the cookbook, left. A sophisticated search function makes it easy to comb through the thousands of recipes using filters, right.
The app also brings recipes you may not have noticed to the forefront, encouraging you to try something new. On a regular basis, Mark Bittman selects a dish for the Featured Recipes section and you can see other user?s highly rated recipe pics in the Most Popular section. Quick Dinners is great for those nights when you?re exhausted, short on time and tempted by Chinese take-out ? every dish can be prepared in 30 minutes or less. Everything from the book can be found in the mobile app, split between two sections: Browse Recipes and Kitchen Basics. Being familiar with the layout of the book makes it easier to understand how the vast amount of information is organized.
Browse Recipes
Tap Browse Recipes and you?ll find a list of categories made up of chapter titles from the book: Appetizers, Soups, Beans, Poultry, Bread and Desserts, among several others. Choose a dish category to find the information categorized further by cooking technique, dish type or the different varieties of ingredient. For example, Fish and Shellfish is broken down into sections devoted to soups, cooking whole fish or different types of fish. In the book, these categories correspond to headings within a chapter. Essentials, the building blocks of cooking a particular type of dish or food, is always the first option for every recipe group.
Tap Browse Recipes for a list of 15 recipe categories from the cookbook, consisting of dish type and ingredient, left. Select Fish and Shellfish to find the recipes categorized further, beginning with Essentials, right.
If you know what type of dish you?re interested in cooking (for example, Fish Soups and Stews) tap it to view all the recipes in that category. With such a massive amount of content to sort through, this app is all about drilling down through categories to find the information you?re looking for.
Viewing Recipes
Viewing recipes listed in the app reveals several statistics at a glance: time to cook, popularity amongst other users, as well as whether the recipe is FMV or E (Fast, Make Ahead, Vegetarian or Essential). Choose a recipe to get an Overview, take a look at the Ingredients or review the Steps. One example of how this app goes above and beyond is by including buttons to access related technique lessons at the bottom of the Overview screen. For the Bouillabaisse recipe, these techniques include Removing a Mussel Beard, Shucking Oysters and Peeling Shrimp. It?s all organized in bite-sized pieces that are easy to read on the small iPhone screen.
Recipes in the list are labeled with several stats to help you out (Fast, Make Ahead, Vegetarian and/or Essential), as well as time to cook and popularity amongst other users, left. Select a recipe for a description of the dish and related content, such as instructions for cooking techniques, right.
Mark Bittman?s simple, straightforward cooking style is especially suited to the mobile environment. You?ll notice the Ingredients list is bold and clean, while the recipe Steps are broken down into manageable tasks. Sometimes the Ingredients offers a backup option if you don?t have access to the preferred ingredient. Tap the circle next to the backup ingredient before adding it to your Shopping List to reflect that change. The more you use the app, the more you?ll appreciate all the functionality it offers. The box with an arrow in the top right corner is called an action icon, and selecting it reveals a menu of options, including Save to Favorites, Add to Grocery List, put the recipe on your iPhone calendar, Email or print the recipe and share via Twitter or Facebook.
The bold and clean ingredients list is easy to read, left. Swipe the screen to move through each recipe step, right.
You?ve got two options when it comes to reading through a recipe: vertical orientation or horizontal ?cook mode.? If you turn the phone horizontally the recipe instructions reconfigure slightly to make it easier to read and navigate, and the screen will not go to sleep. Either way, just swipe left to right to go through the steps. You?ll also notice timers throughout the recipe instructions. It?s nice to be able to utilize these timers, which will still run and alarm even if the app is not open.
Kitchen Basics
In the Kitchen Basics section of the app you?ll find detailed explanations and recommendations regarding ingredients, equipment and techniques. This is an area you could easily spend hours reading through in the cookbook, but should be utilized more as a quick reference on the mobile interface. It?s especially helpful if you?re familiar with the book and know what you?re looking for. The Basics of Various Dishes section is a compliment to the recipes section, broken up into the same major categories. It?s useful if you have an ingredient in mind and want to know all the different techniques for preparing it (for example, eggs).
Kitchen Basics is a massive instructional section of the app, with illustrated guides on more than 400 techniques, as well as recommendations for purchasing ingredients and kitchen gadgets.
This area of the app is massive, with access to a ton of information. You?ll find everything from illustrated instructions on how to butcher a chicken to how to sharpen your knives and what kind of pots and pans to buy. It?s great to have access to all the content in the book, but hard to picture users really availing of the information presented in this way. One positive thing to note is that you don?t need an Internet connection to access the content, so reading through the Kitchen Basics section may be a great way to kill time while traveling or waiting in line, dreaming of dinner.
Sophisticated Lists
One of the features users will most appreciate about this app are the customizable lists in the Favorites and Shop sections. We?re all used to adding recipes to favorites and creating shopping lists, but in How to Cook Everything for iPhone you can create multiple Favorites lists with unique titles, categorizing your favorite recipes by season, dish type, family member or whatever else you can think of. You?ll be glad for the option to refer to recipes you?ve recently viewed.
Customize the titles your shopping lists by event or however you like, left. View the list organized by grocery aisle, alphabetically or order added, right.
Grocery lists are easy to manage and present several viewing options: by aisle, alphabetical or in order added. Tapping on the ?i? enclosed in a circle reveals additional information about the ingredient (for example: specifying monkfish or catfish for the ?white fish? on the list). Use the pen and basket icons in the top right corner switch between edit and shop mode, respectively. Shop mode allows you to check off items you?ve put in the cart. Edit mode is for rearranging ingredients (drag), deleting and adding your own ingredients to the list. A lot of recipe apps ignore this area, and it?s nice to see so much attention to the details and user experience in How to Cook Everything for iPhone.
Conclusion
How to Cook Everything for iPhone is in a league of its own when compared to other iPhone apps. Mark Bittman?s simple, straightforward recipes are well suited to the compact environment of a mobile phone, and the developers have created an app that?s easy to use. It?s great to be able to jump around between sections of the app and reference different areas without losing your place in the section you?ve left behind. The powerful search tool and customizable shopping lists make for an exceptional user experience. The attention to detail and investment in creating a good user experience is evidenced by an app that operates smoothly ? no bugs or roadblocks. The seamless interaction between user and interface frees you to just get in the kitchen and cook, which is what Mark Bittman is all about.
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