For aspiring home cooks, the journey to into the culinary world can be rather intimidating, and one of the best resources to use are the revered Cooks’ Illustrated magazines.  There are no fancy pictures of food porn that illicit our naughty food desires, just black and white illustrations and a multitude of techniques for the rest of us to take our culinary techniques to the next level.

The folks from America’s Test Kitchen has released the Cook’s Illustrated application for the iPhone and iTouch devices running OS4.  With a myriad of instructional cooking applications in the App Store, will this application stand out amongst its peers, or fade away into the obscure void of mediocre applications?

Let’s take a look and see.

The splash screen looks just like the cover of it’s paper brethren, and gives way after a second to the front page.  The navigation is simple and clean, laced with plenty of white and earth tones.  For existing web subscribers, there is a ‘Login’ button to sign in or to sign up.  While the app is free, non-subscribers are limited to a set number of recipes, while subscribers have unrestricted access.  Feeling like eating chicken? Then scroll down to ‘Poultry’.  How about French?  Then head on over to ‘Cuisine’.  The app requires an Internet connection to access the content.

At the bottom of the screen are four icons, Recipes (default), Taste Tests, Shopping List, and Favorites.  We’ll tackle the latter three as the review progresses.

I’m craving steak, so I’m going to the ‘Meat’ category for a list of recipes.  The ‘Pan-Seared Thick-Cut Strip Steaks’ looks good.  On the recipe page, there are three tabs up top.  The ‘Article’ tab provides a quick overview, a pictorial link to a video tutorial, followed by ‘The Problem’, ‘The Goal’, and ‘The Solution’.

The ‘Ingredients’ tab gives the number of servings, a description of the ingredients, and a list of ingredients.  Touching the ‘plus’ icons next to the recipes will add the ingredients to the shopping list, a nice touch indeed.

The ‘Instructions’ tab contains detailed steps on how to prepare the dish, plus there are additional graphic and pictorial illustrations to further aid the user.  Another plus is the addition of the timer buttons.  Just touch the icon and start the timer, or if you want, label the timer.  Furthermore, a ‘Timers’ tab located at the bottom right corner can be activated to manage the timers or to add additional timers.

There is a ‘Favorites’ feature as well.  Touch the arrow icon at the upper right corner and you have several options to choose from.

The ‘Taste Tests’ section features review and recommendations of various products.  It’s nothing new or unusual, but does give good information.

The Good: Easy to use, easy to navigate, clean interface, lots of detail and instructional tools, lots of recipes, the timer and shopping list make a nice touch.  Retains that Cook’s Illustrated feel, even though it’s been ported to a compact electronic medium.

The Bad: Internet connectivity required, but understandable given the amount of content.  Membership required to leverage full content.

The Ugly: The shopping list and favorites are wiped clean if the application is closed, remains if left running in the background.

4 out of 5! Robot Chef Recommended!