For many of us, cooking simply isn’t a skill we possess, with our repertoire of meals consisting of a few numbers in our phone labelled “Chinese†or “Pizzaâ€. Cookbooks are not much help as too often they rely on prior experience and it can be hard to know what to expect from your culinary adventures when all you have to go on is text and the odd photograph.
Fortunately, help is on the way in the form of an iPhone app from Jamie Oliver that will make you use your phone for more than just take out.
Oliver can inspire love or loathing in equal measure, but personality aside the one thing he can do is write a recipe that even the most kitchen averse could follow. Venturing into the world of apps, Jamie has come up with an absolute gem in his 20 Minute Meals, an iPhone application that takes his no-nonsense approach to cooking and combines it with all the multimedia and interactive capabilities that the iPhone has to offer. The result is an intuitive and user-friendly piece of software that will get you off your couch and cooking in a matter of minutes.
Easy to cook
There are 55 dishes contained in the app to begin with and these are neatly categorised by food type such as pasta or meat and fish. Each of these meals are designed to be cooked and ready to eat in 20 minutes and assume that you have never set foot in your kitchen before.
Pick a recipe and you are presented with a screen that summarises the dish and a selection of videos that demonstrate useful tips relevant to the meal such as how to cook perfect pasta or prepare garlic like a pro.
Next to the summary is a tab that lists what ingredients you need and crucially what kind of equipment will deliver the best results all of which you can add to personal shopping lists that you can take with you when you are shopping.
The last tab is the meat of the app and is a screen-by-screen ‘how to’, which displays every step with a photograph and the odd audio tip from Jamie (these can be silenced of course) that act as reminders and deliver small tips.
Our test delivered surprisingly accurate results and while we took longer than 20 minutes to whip up our feast, it wasn’t far off.
Best of all, the app is continually updated with new recipes and while we would expect there to be a charge for these updates in the future, for now they a free which adds more value to a great app. There’s an initial outlay of €5.99 which is quite high by app standards, but we think that’s well worth it.
Although this app isn’t the first of its kind, it’s certainly the most accomplished and we predict that the app store will soon be awash with celebrity chefs hawking their digital cookbooks. For now, though, picking up this app will have you happily going cold turkey on your take out addiction.
Leo Stiles
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