With a plethora of cooking apps filling up the App Store, what can The Video Cookbook produce to earn its seat at the head of the table?
By Leo Stiles
There is no shortage of cooking apps on the App Store these days, with even Z-list celebrity chefs getting in on the act and producing culinary apps. Unfortunately, these apps tend to be a bit text-heavy and despite the odd picture and video, attempts at gastronomic excellence may escape you, with your overcooked slop scarcely resembling the picture.
Fortunately for those of us that need a little bit more handholding in the kitchen, The Video Cookbook is here to lend a more practical helping hand and help you produce something both edible and appealing to the eye.
As soon as you fire up the app you are presented with five options that group the app’s 120 recipes into five categories. These categories range from snacks and starters to side dishes and main courses and offer enough variety to create a weekly menu without being repetitive.
Tap a category and you are brought into a grid based interface, with each dish represented by a picture alongside handy information such as serving number and a star-based difficulty rating that allows you steer clear of some of the more challenging dishes.
Tapping into a dish displays a series of photographs and step-by-step instructions underneath, which also give you handy information like preparation time; a feature that a lot of cooking apps fail to include and which significantly aids your projected work time in the kitchen.
No, this app doesn’t make your iPad any tastier…
On the left-hand side of the screen is the ingredients column, which is standard enough but recalculates every ingredient dependent on how many mouths you have to feed. This can be brought down to a single serving if you like or raised to hundreds but if you have that many people to feed we reckon you have bigger problems than how to cook the perfect steak.
The headline feature of the app is the video, that accompanies each recipe and can last anywhere from three to six minutes depending on the dish. At first we were a bit annoyed that you have to download each video before viewing but in hindsight this proves to be a smart move as those videos are all presented in high definition and take up significant space on your iPad; also, chances are that you will never use all the videos.
Those of you that do want to have the complete video collection at your fingertips can download all the videos at once through a button in the settings menu – just don’t blame us if you run out of precious memory on your iPad.
Video aids
Speaking of those videos; they do really make all the difference and let you see the cooking techniques used and how your efforts should actually look at each step of the recipe. Unfortunately it’s not all good, with many of the preparation techniques for things like meat and vegetables missing from these tutorials. There is another app called Culinary Fundamentals from the same developer that contains all these techniques but that will necessitate switching between the two and as such, is a disappointment.
The impact of having decent videos became immediately apparent with our attempts at beef wellington going over rather better than we would have previously done, demonstrating that cooking can really benefit from visual demonstration.
The last piece of the package is the shopping list, which is a standard part of any cooking app and works just like you would expect with each recipe’s ingredients having the option to be sent to a list which can be crossed off as you go.
A neat little touch is that this app also allows you to categorise the list into aisles so you can round up ingredients without trailing back and forth between aisles in the supermarket.
Overall, this is a content-rich and packed cooking application that with more joined-up thinking could have been the killer app for budding chefs. As it stands the app certainly produces much improved cooking and for that alone its worth recommending.
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