One high-tech cooking tool, however, has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans: the cellphone.
It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.
“It taught me to cook, really,” said Kelli Howell, a college sophomore in Chicago, of her Nokia phone. Its photography, Internet and instant-messaging capabilities let her consult with friends, family and online sources as she got started in the kitchen. “I e-mailed about 20 pictures of a vegetable lasagna to my sister’s phone while I was making it,” she said. “And then I I.M.’ed with my mom about the topping.”
Restaurant chefs have a proud history of technophobia — their attitude was: if it can’t cook a steak or smell a fish, I don’t need it in my kitchen — but cellphones have crossed the technology barrier from the office into the kitchen.
Chris Cosentino, the chef at Incanto restaurant in San Francisco, says his iPhone has greatly simplified the math in his cooking. “When I’m making salami or sausage, the proportion of meat to salt to spice is key,” he said. (He uses an application called iConvert to adapt each batch for the amount of freshly butchered pork he is working with that day.) Mr. Cosentino said that he sees multifunction devices like the iPhone as the real technological revolution for chefs.
“You’re never going to get a chef to sit at a desk or a computer screen all day,” he said. “But I can take this to the farmers’ market, I can take it to Italy, use it as a camera, look up the history of dishes so I can brief my servers, and make voice notes while I’m cooking,” he said. “And then do I use it to play the Macarena in the kitchen and drive everyone crazy? Yes, I do.”
For amateur cooks, new cellphone software helps control the chaos of planning, shopping and cooking dinner at the end of the day. Michael Pavone, a firefighter, does most of the shopping and cooking for Engine Company 3, in the South End neighborhood of Boston. “If we’re called out to an incident or a fire, I don’t exactly have time to write down a list of ingredients,” he said. “But I always have my phone with me.” Since last year, Mr. Pavone has used his iPhone to skim recipes and generate shopping lists to make dinner for 14 firefighters.
His phone holds software from BigOven.com, a Web site with about 167,000 recipes. BigOven’s free iPhone application, searchable by ingredient, by rating, and by course has been downloaded more than a million times since it was released in October. “We have user-generated content, imported from all over the Web, combined with an active social network,” said Steve Murch, the founder of BigOven. “It’s like YouTube for recipes.”
As mobile technology permeates American life, buying ingredients, sharing recipes and working in the kitchen is becoming more phone-friendly. “At first, mobile devices changed our social lives,” said Amanda Lenhart, a researcher for the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “Now, they are penetrating into our domestic lives as well. Cooking has become far more interactive and mobile than it was a decade ago.”
At the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt., the executive chef, Tom Bivins, said tech-loving culinary students quickly learn to use their phones to document their dishes for class portfolios or Facebook pages, to set reminders for the ingredients they have to prep for the next day’s classes, and to develop restaurant-business skills like purchasing, inventory and budgets, via mobile links to the school’s online resource material.
“These days, part of working in this kitchen is that you have to check e-mail right before service, once during service, and once afterwards,” said Floyd Cardoz, executive chef of Tabla, in the Flatiron district. Mr. Cardoz uses his BlackBerry to communicate with the sous-chefs who work under him throughout each shift. “If I see one of my guys putting the duck in the oven flesh side down instead of skin side down, I just send everyone an e-mail immediately,” he said. “It’s a great teaching tool.” In low-tech kitchens, yelling often performs this function, but Tabla has three separate kitchens and a soft-spoken chef. Electronic communication is simply more effective.With so many possibilities opening, software designers, food companies and Internet entrepreneurs are racing to stake out space on every cook’s phone. Most of the mobile apps now available are simple timers or list-making programs, like Grocery iQ and Jott. Already, phones can hold quirky chunks of information like lists of environmentally friendly seafood, vintage cocktail handbooks and a timer for making the perfect soft-boiled egg.
“I am equally obsessed with Apple and with eggs,” said Michael Ratledge, a British musician who designed such a timer. Called Eggy, it is just the kind of quirky, crisp little widget that has made the iPhone so popular. A warning whistle summons the cook to the kitchen to assume a ready position next to the stove, slotted spoon in hand: when the timer finally goes off, with a crowing sound, the egg is supposed to have reached the exact moment when its yolk is runny and the whites have set. For 99 cents, Eggy provides visual pleasure, edification and entertainment (including egg-related citations from English literature). “It’s not absolutely necessary, but it’s intensely pleasurable in its small way,” Mr. Ratledge said.
Small is nice, but big companies, sensing the purchasing power of a device that goes with you to the grocery store, have bigger plans.
In November, Kraft Foods introduced iFood Assistant, the most detailed and user-friendly mobile cooking app yet. It provides access to Kraftfoods.com, the most-visited Web site of any food manufacturer, according to Nielsen Online.
The iFood Assistant is the first cooking application to make use of the iPhone’s global positioning system. Once you have chosen a recipe (say, this week’s Cheesy Football — a football-shaped cheese ball), it will pinpoint your phone’s location and provide directions to the nearest grocery store (where, of course, relevant Kraft products like Philadelphia cream cheese, Miracle Whip and Ritz crackers are sold). At the store, your phone can play Kraft’s instructional video on Cheese Ball Basics and break down the recipe’s shopping list according to aisle (Dairy; Crackers), presumably speeding progress through the store.
“We look at cooking and shopping as a seamless experience,” said Ed Kaczmarek, director of innovation for new services at Kraft’s headquarters in Chicago. “We wanted an app that would streamline both parts, because that’s the main thing we hear from the community: make it easier.”
The application also makes reading the recipe easier once the cook is back in the kitchen: turn the phone from vertical to horizontal, and the directions break down into boldface steps that flip, like index cards, with a touch of the screen.
As busy as the Kraft Web site is, more than twice as many people visit Allrecipes.com, where most of the content is user-generated and the community rules. (Allrecipes and BigOven both have five-star rating systems, like the one that is so powerful for shoppers at Amazon.com.)
Both sites, and other media outlets like Food Network, Epicurious and The New York Times have software designed for mobile phones. Barbara Sweeney of Branford, Conn., uses the Allrecipes DinnerSpinner, an iPhone application with a slot-machine-like display, to pull up new recipes while browsing the aisles at her local Stop & Shop.
“I used to end up shopping and cooking from memory and making the same five things all the time,” she said. Users choose the course, main ingredient and prep time, and then spin through the various recipe options — or just shake the phone to bring up a random choice. If lamb is on sale, or if artichokes are in season, she can search for recipes that contain both. Depending on the number of stars that recipe has, Ms. Sweeney says, she might try it out.
“I love reading the ratings beforehand and doing the ratings afterwards,” she said. “You do feel like you have shared something with the other people who made that dish, even if you will never meet them.”
The top-rated recipe on Allrecipes.com is one for Banana Banana Bread. Exquisitely plain (and useful, because it uses five or six overripe bananas, not the usual two or three), it has been rated by more than 3,500 cooks. Each review offers comments and variations: a topping here, chocolate chips there, a trick for greasing the pan. That’s feedback from far more cooks than anyone at home leafing through a cookbook, or pulling out mom’s old recipe scribbled on an index card, usually has to go on.
“The status of the family recipe, the chef and the cookbook is definitely changing” said Ms. Lenhart. “The Internet has taken away the gatekeepers, and replaced them with majority rule.”
Guided by a four-star BigOven rating and a sale on shrimp at the supermarket, Mr. Pavone made a new recipe last Saturday, kung pao shrimp. “I just typed ‘wok’ into the phone,” he said. Mr. Pavone is trying out new dishes for an upcoming charity cook-off among New England firefighters. He has just acquired a wok, and also a kitchen torch for making crème brûlée. “Having all these recipes at my fingertips has definitely made me more curious as a cook,” he said.
Dinner was successful, but late, he said. The company was called out several times during the afternoon, but one firefighter stayed behind each time to keep shelling the mountain of shrimp.
“I guess that’s one thing my phone can’t do,” he said.
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