Cooking from a written recipe can present quite a number of physical challenges, ones I wish we talked about more openly and more often.
Say you’re cooking from a colossal cookbook. What if it’s got an energetic spine, closing shut without your consent? Awful. Better weigh it down properly. A computer? Make sure you’ve got it near your kitchen, and careful—it’d be a shame if you were to spill some corruptive solvent on it. Printing out a recipe? That’s a real waste of paper.
How arduous. Over the weekend, a tweet from food writer Adam Erace was thrust into my feed; in it, he presented a surefire way to skirt the small, fussy inconveniences of cooking basic, go-to recipes. All you need is a phone. His secret? Circumvent the hardship at all and store those go-to recipes and ratios as contacts.
A fine recommendation from Erace. This certainly beats having to scour the mobile web for a recipe; you'll skip many steps, and there's no internet connection necessary. Contacts are much harder to delete than, say, notes or text messages. As the folks at Lifehacker point out, Erace's method makes it quite easy to summon Siri to recite those cooking instructions at your command. Give it a whirl. It’s a nice trick.
Have a tip better than Adam Erace’s? Let us know in the comments.
Written by: Mayukh Sen
Popular on Food52
11 Comments
Seriously, I keep my most tried-and-true ratios/measurement conversions/done-ness temps as laminated fridge magnets. Recipes-to-try are written in my Rocketbook notepad, then photographed and uploaded. If they "make the cut", they're filed in Evernote (with all my other cut-and-paste web findings). Even the super-special handwritten recipes from several generations of cooks in my family are stored digitally just-in-case my recipe box is ever lost. My cookbooks only survive a few years before being passed along to a friend or a local library. I only keep the books that are good references for a technique or improvisational guideline or a good read about the history or reminiscence about the dish.
It cracks me up to use your contacts for recipe storage, because now I'm assigning dishes to different friends and associates.
I'm not ready to let go of books.
Like Carrie or Scott pointed out already, there are PLENTY of apps that can do this job which are actually made to do this kind of thing. Evernote is excellent, as is Google Keep.
This idea would be like keeping documents as photos because you like the photo app better, or using a screwdriver to open a bottle of beer, because you have it handy.
See what other Food52 readers are saying.