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I would like to cook a meal, but i have no clue about cooking. Is there some kind of an app (smartphone / ipad) that would guide me through the process of cooking a specific meal? Step by step like in kindergarten.

  • get 2 spoons
  • get 2 eggs
  • seperate eggs
  • place 200 g of XY in a bowl
  • cook eggs for 19 seconds
  • etc etc

Really step by step with text, pictures and/or videos.

Gero
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  • You need instructions to pick up spoons and eggs but not to separate eggs? ;) – ElendilTheTall Dec 30 '12 at 17:06
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    You could stream cooking shows of your choice.... Or you tube videos showing what you want to see. – SAJ14SAJ Dec 30 '12 at 17:10
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    @ElendilTheTall: what's hard about separating two eggs? If you put each one in its own bowl, they won't touch. – Joe Dec 31 '12 at 03:34
  • It is the same thing with differential equations and programming assembler. If you know it, it is really really easy. But i assume there are also more challenging meals than eggs ^^ – Gero Dec 31 '12 at 12:03

2 Answers2

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Try Jamie's 20 minute meals. I've used it for a few meals and its pretty easy to follow. The recipes are all supposed to take 20 mins, but in my experience it takes a bit longer, maybe I'm just a bit slow in the kitchen! The only thing that has really caught me out though is when it tells me to chop something in the middle of the recipe, which takes me a bit longer than the app assumes - so I now check over the recipe and chop anything in advance.

The app lists all of the ingredients and equipment you need, and it has some videos showing you some of the basic skills and knowledge for each recipe. Its got a shopping list

The app has about 80 recipes that cover soups, pastas, risottos, stir-fries, fish, meat, curries, salads, vegetarian and desserts. There is a decent range of cuisines, but it does lean a bit toward Italian.

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/20-minute-meals-jamie-oliver/id318926433?mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zolmo.twentymm&hl=en

Brian Flynn
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Before there were smart phones**, there was Deep Fried Live! ... unfortunately, it's in flash, so won't work on most smart phones. And after he got hired off to write for Good Eats, they didn't make any more.

Even if you're anti-flash (as I am), I highly recommend

** (okay, there were some smart phones out in 2001 / 2002, but they were pretty rare ... and back then, they tended to be considered more as PDAs that could make phone calls ... mobile web browsing back then was that whole WAP/WML nightmare that tried to basically re-create gopher)

...

I'm going to guess that there are such apps out there -- I mean, there were multiple of them for the Nintendo DS (Jamie Oliver, America's Test Kitchen) ... I just have no idea what they are, or if they're any good.

Joe
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  • there are many apps who kinda work as a recipe catalogue, but that is not what i am looking for. – Gero Jan 01 '13 at 15:28
  • Take a look at Deep Fried Live -- and let me know if that's the sort of thing you're looking for. I've always thought that cooking show DVDs could be much enhanced w/ a similar treatment where you could hit a 'get more info' button as you went to get details about what they were doing, or an alternate camera angle to show what it looked like from over their shoulder. – Joe Jan 02 '13 at 17:56
  • hmm deep fried live is interesting, but its to much show for me. I just want to get from A to Z and get the job done. Since i have no clue about cooking, i would like to be told by "experts/exp cooks" how to do step A, step B, etc etc – Gero Jan 02 '13 at 21:17
  • @Gero : the problem with most food prep is that even the most detailed set of checklists are going to fail without some preparation in advance. If you have to get a refresher in the middle while there's some other time-sensitive task, you're going to fail. Unless you have someone cooking along with you, you really need to see what the complete steps are before you start. (and I admit, my biggest pet peeve of cooking shows is when they replace things out in the middle -- if it's something from the oven, okay, but for anything else you have no idea how much effort they just hid from you) – Joe Jan 02 '13 at 21:46