How to Cook Everything Review

New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman set out more than a decade ago to make complicated, restaurant-style cooking accessible to the masses. His encyclopedic cookbook, How to Cook Everything, quickly became a runaway success and earned the author a place next to Julia Child on any serious foodie’s bookshelf. Now, this weighty tome has found the ideal interactive home on the iPad.

As far as we can tell, the app lives up to its title. Containing more than 2,000 recipes, How to Cook Everything gives you the know-how to cook; well, everything, from boiled water and fried eggs, to filet mignon and osso bucco.

Of course a book of this size could seem pretty intimidating; even for the most dedicated of cooks. Thankfully, developers Culinate, Inc. have done an excellent job making recipe-browsing simple and accessible on the iPad. Through clear, hand-drawn technique illustrations and intuitive, easy-to-follow instructions, Bittman guides the reader through every step of preparation.

The app’s home screen lists a number of vibrantly photographed featured recipes (which rotate on a weekly basis), and links to a variety of quick dinner menus, popular selections, and "author’s picks". You can also browse the entire cookbook, search for recipes, or view short, instructional articles on cooking. The sheer multitude of ways you can interact with the book’s contents is nothing short of astonishing.

Once you select a recipe, the screen divides into multiple panes: one for ingredients, and another for cooking instructions. Within the instructional pane, you can also write notes to yourself, much as you would in the margins of your favorite physical cookbook, or view related content. In a recipe for Eggs Benedict, for example, we had the option to view an article on proper usage of a chef’s knife or another about variations on the dish.

Each recipe also comes with a number of now-standard eCookbook features, including the ability to create a shopping list out of the ingredients, social network shareability, and a thumbs-up feature that allows you in influence the recipes that appear in your ‘popular’ list.

While we generally love the easy-to-follow manner in which the app presents each recipe, we do have some quibbles with the overall design.To begin with, there is no way to enlarge the recipe instructions window, thus confining it to a pre-defined area of the screen. This deficiency, combined with an area of largely wasted space at the top of each window, unnecessarily cramps the instructional text. To be sure, the iPad’s screen has plenty of space, so viewing a recipe is not at all difficult, but we still wish that we could take advantage of the whole thing.

We were also less than impressed with the social features of the app. Culinate has given users the ability to give a thumbs-up to recipes that impress them, but such ratings are one-sided. There is no way to vote "thumbs down" on less-than stellar dishes, or post comments for others to read. The developers missed an opportunity to increase the app’s already impressive value by creating an online community, such as that which exists on sites like Allrecipes and Chowhound.

That said, these problems are minor sticking points in an otherwise outstanding eCookbook. In short, the app is a true value. With a purchase price clocking in at $9.99, How to Cook Everything is currently ten bucks cheaper than its physical counterpart, and eight dollars cheaper than it’s non-interactive Kindle version. With all of its iPad-only features, any devoted foodie would be hard-pressed to pass this app by. It gets our highest recommendation.