Jamie Oliver's iPhone App: 20 Minute Meals
Jamie Oliver has released a new iPhone app 20 Minute Meals, a self-contained digital mini-cookbook that sets the bar really, really high. It features 50 recipes with an integrated shopping list sorted by grocery store aisle, step-by-step instructional photos, and over 90 minutes of video clips with Jamie Oliver teaching basic kitchen skills like sharpening knives and chopping onions. It has metric and US measurements, and allows for adjusting portion sizes based on the amount of people. There's even a shake-to-get-a-random-recipe feature. It does nothing terribly new or unique, but as an integrated package, it's by far the most polished cooking app we've seen.
So we gave it a spin. It's a weird hybrid of a lot of different types of iPhone apps, combining recipes with shopping lists and instructional cooking videos. The videos are fine, but if you're already an remotely accomplished cook you don't need a refresher course on how to chop an onion, but bonus for tailoring recipes to take twenty minutes of less to produce. The only thing we'd wish for would be the ability to add (and purchase) new recipes, but surely that's coming. Cookbook publishers would be wise to follow this model, as Jamie Oliver's 20 Minute Meals, in some ways, signifies the future of online recipe publishing.
No joke at 404 MB, it costs £4.99 in the UK or $7.99 in the US (iTunes store).
—Raphael Brion
Earlier on Eat Me Daily
- iLickit: The First iPhone Game You Can Play With Your Tongue [video]
- The Foodspotting iPhone App Looks a Lot Like Other Stuff
- Zagat iPhone App Review: 'Cumbersome,' 'Horribly Slow'
- Michael Pollan Wants an iPhone App to Tell if Your Chicken Was Factory Farmed
