I’ve had a laptop in my kitchen for several years now. At first it was mostly for checking email and doing a little work when I was away from my home office, but pretty soon I started to use it while cooking – I keep family recipes on it and use Epicurious and other recipe websites regularly.

However, most people I know don’t keep computers in the kitchen. And let’s face it, when you’re cooking do you really want to get tomato sauce splattered on the machine that also holds your quarterly expense reports?

With the rise of e-book readers and smartphones, there are lots of options now for technology in the kitchen, and my laptop is rapidly being supplanted by my iPhone and the new iPad. Here’s a roundup of the current state of the art.

E-book or App?

Mario Batali e-book on the iPad

What’s the difference between an e-book and an App? An e-book, at least for now, is an electronic copy of a paper book. Usually the publisher generates an e-book file from the same material used to make the paper book, so what you see on the screen is very similar to what you see on paper. An app, on the other hand, is a software application, just like a computer game or word processor is a software application. Which means it’s not limited to looking, or acting, like a book.

The most well known e-book reader is Amazon’s Kindle, which seeks to replicate the ink-on-paper experience by using a type of electronic ink. Many readers praise the Kindle for this – it’s easy on the eyes and provides a long battery life.

However, for now at least, the Kindle is restricted to only providing an electronic copy of the paper book experience. Yes, there’s some searchability, and a few other bells and whistles (it can read out loud to you). But a book is pretty much just a book with a Kindle. You turn pages, you read the words. It even requires a book-light for nighttime reading.

The iPhone, iPod and iPad represent another option. Along with other smartphones, such as those running the Android operating system, they are essentially small computers. Sure, they can simulate the book experience – there are numerous e-book readers available, including Amazon’s Kindle application and the new Apple iBook application – but their power lies in their flexibility.

As computers, they are capable of pretty much anything a computer can do – they can play music, movies, games, and make a cookbook much more than just a book. This is where I think the future lies for e-cookbooks, or at least the most exciting part of it.

E-Books

At the time of writing, Amazon’s Kindle store has almost 5,000 titles in the cooking, food and wine section. Lots of popular cookbooks are missing: no Julia Child, only one Mark Bittman title (Food Express), no Joy of Cooking or Martha Stewart titles. But I presume many will come as publishers release their books in e-book formats.

Apple’s iBook online store has even fewer. You can’t currently list the amount of titles in a section, so I don’t know how many cookbooks they have, but there is a distinct Cookbooks section at least. At first, it appears to only have two categories: ‘Regional & Ethnic’ and ‘Drinks’. But when you click on a specific title you suddenly get more categories, such as ‘Methods’.  It is a frustrating store to browse through. Since it’s so new, I expect it to fill up more as time goes on. And I certainly hope they improve the usability.

One advantage of both the Kindle and iBooks stores is that you can get the first chapter of any book for free, which gives you a chance to evaluate them. With cookbooks, what you get as a sample varies – if there’s a long introduction, that’s all you’ll get, but if it’s fairly short, you may also get a number of recipes to try out.

I compared the iBooks and Kindle sample chapters from Sara Moulton’s Everyday Family Dinners and they appeared to be identical (the publisher would have provided the same formatted file to both booksellers). They did have several photographs, which looked just as you’d expect them to look – color on the iPad and several shades of grey on the Kindle.

The experience of using a cookbook on both the Kindle and the iPad is virtually identical to using a paper cookbook. You read the instructions, turn the pages, and try not to spill olive oil on the screen. Perhaps the main advantage (other than being able to keep multiple cookbooks on the same device) is the search function – you can quickly search the text of any book for key words.

It remains to be seen whether publishers will do anything to enhance the e-book versions of their cookbooks. Already there are enhanced versions of books available from Random House, containing videos, audio extras, games and interviews, but currently they can only be read on a computer as e-book readers don’t support the enhanced content.

Apps

I believe that the most interesting uses of the medium will come in the form of apps, given their flexibility compared to e-books alone. I don’t own an Android device, so I’ve only been able to explore what’s available on the iTunes App Store, which provides apps for the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad.

Apple’s App Store contains many of food and cooking related apps, but most are of dubious provenance (or at least unproven). Apps with pedigrees, from trusted sources, are starting to appear now. Note: all app titles link to the corresponding apps in the iTunes Store.

How to Cook Everything
$4.99

This is a complete version of the famous Mark Bittman cookbook – it includes every one of the over 2000 recipes in the book, at a quarter the price of the paper version.  But this is not an e-book, rather it is a full-featured cooking app, which takes the material from the book and reorganizes and repurposes it. I think it is the best example of the possibility of the medium so far.

It is searchable, of course, and also allows you to browse the recipes several ways: Bittman’s Picks, Most Popular (continuously updated as users vote on their favourite recipes), Featured Recipe and Quick Dinners.

It has a built-in shopping list you can fill by clicking a button in the recipe you’re planning to cook. You can easily flag favorite recipes in a favorites list. There’s an entire section on kitchen basics, with advice on kitchen equipment, techniques and ingredients.

Perhaps my favorite feature is in the ‘steps’ section of each recipe. Each step that has a time associated with it (cook onion for 5 minutes, for example) has an integrated timer. Click the little clock icon and a timer pops up, set to the exact time specified in the recipe.

I could go on and on about how useful this is, but I’ll keep it short. I bought this immediately after it came out and it was worth every penny – not only are you getting an entire, great, cookbook, but you’re also getting a very useful kitchen tool. It could only improve if they launched an iPad version too.

Ratio
$4.99

One of the first adapted cookbook apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch, this is not a complete version Michael Ruhlman’s well-regarded Ratio cookbook but rather a type of calculator, with added recipes – it cleverly takes the conceit of the book (that there are standard ratios or formulas behind most great recipes) and converts it into a tool for kitchen use. Since ratios are all about calculation for your particular needs, and the calculations can get complicated sometimes, this makes lots of sense as an app. It also allows you to save your own recipes and variations for future reference.

20 Minute Meals: Jamie Oliver
$7.99

This app contains 60 recipes (it has had recipes added semi-regularly since being first published; these upgrades are free for owners). Compared to the over 2,000 in the cheaper How to Cook Everything app, it seems like less of a bargain. However, this is not just an elegant translation of a cookbook into an application, but more like a cooking class from Mr. Oliver himself – each recipe has step-by-step instructions, multiple photographs, voice prompts, and access to 21 videos with tips and kitchen skills (knife sharpening and onion cutting included…). I could see giving this to a young person with interests in the kitchen to encourage them to learn some new recipes and some basic kitchen skills. This cries out for an iPad version to take advantage of the larger screen.

Epicurious
Free (advertising-supported)

An excellent, excellent app – available in iPhone/iPod and iPad versions. The iPhone/iPod version is great, and truly useful when you’re in the grocery store and trying to figure out what you want to make for dinner. The iPad version is even better. It makes great use of the larger screen, enabling you to see more of each recipe and making navigation and searching easier too.

David Lebovitz
Free

This is a new app that has potential. It is not a cookbook, or really a cooking app like the previous entries. It’s something a little different: I’d call it a portal to all things Lebovitz. There’s a bookstore (an Amazon web page), a list of author appearances, photos of David and of some of his recipes, several (6 at the time of writing) recipes, one video, and a place for users to chat with each other and David. There’s also a good window into his blog entries and Twitter postings.

It’s an interesting idea – in many ways it replicates information easily available online, but in bringing it all together in one place makes it much easier for his fans to connect with his recipes and writing. I’d like to see more recipes available, as well as more videos, but I’m curious to see how it develops over time.

Other Apps & Cookbooks

These are various apps which I have not downloaded and have just listed here because they look interesting. You can find them by doing a search on the App Store.

Betty Crocker Mobile Cookbook
Free.

4000 recipes included (available offline too, so it’s not just a web portal app). Half decent searching, no shopping list generator.

BigOven
Free (ad-supported) or $9.99 for the ad-free version.

This app gives access to 170,000 recipes from the BigOven website. At least there’s an iPad version, but it strikes me you could just as easily go to BigOven.com using the web browser in the iPad. However, the same applies to the Epicurious app. The value-added in any of these apps are the tools included to bypass the sometimes slow and clumsy nature of web surfing from a phone.

AllRecipes Dinner Spinner
Free (ad-supported) or Pro version for $2.99

Provides simple access to recipes from the All Recipes website. The Pro version is distinguished by allowing access to your online recipe box, recipe sharing, having better search capabilities and, of course, no ads.

Tyler Florence Fast
$4.99.

Contains 500 recipes plus video content, micro-blog and ‘ask the chef’ advice section.

Culinary Institute of America Apps

The Institute has a series of apps featuring their multimedia training materials, all priced at $29.99 each, based on different cooking methods. They include: Dry Heat Volume 1 and Volume 2, Moist Heat and Cake Art. Their Boot Camp apps (1, 2 and 3) are $8.99 each and provide videos from the 5 day ‘boot camps’ the CIA hold for non-professional food enthusiasts. The DVDs for these ‘ProChef’ titles are $99.99 each on the CIA website, so these could be a significant deal, but it’s not clear if the apps contain all the material on the DVDs.

Protecting your device

Cookbooks invariably end up getting a bit stained and splattered; it adds character. But you don’t want your new $500 iPad or iPhone to be stained and splattered, so some sort of protection is in order. There are various fancy cases coming out all the time, but there’s no need to spend lots of money to get something simple. I have used a simple plastic cookbook stand for the iPad. It protects it quite well, though you still have to reach around with potentially dirty fingers to scroll the screen or press a button. Even simpler is a plastic sandwich or freezer bag. You can still swipe and press buttons on the capacitive touch screens of the iPhone, iPod and iPad, and the devices are protected from everything wet and sticky. However, hot oil (or a kettle or hot element) could melt the plastic bag, so best to keep this away from heat sources.

Or you could do this: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/ipad-merges-with-kitchen-cabinet-sacrificing-portability-for-ut/