With a box full of carrots and a hankering for something vaguely exotic, Mary-Claire van Leunen turned to her computer for a recipe.
“I looked for ‘Turkish carrots’ and I found it easily, in fact I found half a dozen,” the retired Seattle software researcher said.
Everyone’s done it, fired up a search engine to deal with that mound of parsley or a bumper crop of cucumbers, but van Leunen wasn’t randomly appealing to the online universe. She was searching the recipes in her own cookbooks, about 2,000 volumes that line her shelves. Without ever cracking a single spine.
“In the past, I would have gone to the Central Asian section of my books and gone through the indexes,” van Leunen says. “I would have looked in two or three cookbooks and wound up adapting something for fennel or something to the carrots.”
Today, the online cookbook indexing service called Eat Your Books lets her instantly search the index of nearly every cookbook she owns. When she finds the recipe she wants, the Web site tells her the book it’s in.
It’s part of a new wave of digital tools that are changing the way home cooks explore new recipes, revisit old ones and create satisfying meals.
Eat Your Books, launched nine months ago, boasts a library of 88,000 books with more than 2,000 indexed volumes. Users just tell the site which cookbooks they own, then they can quickly peruse the recipes of the chefs and authors they already trust.
Likewise, the Web site Cookstr catalogs recipes from more than 500 chefs and cookbook authors and offers them to users — free of charge. And mobile applications and e-books, once little more than digitized versions of cookbook content, have begun adding features that make the experience interactive and highly personal.
“It is completely feasible today that a mobile device will be the center of the connected kitchen and Cookstr wants to be at the center of that connected kitchen,” Cookstr CEO Art Chang says.
Cookstr offers about 8,000 recipes from 16 major cookbook publishers, each of them sifted by a team of food-savvy “curators” who categorize them by variables such as ingredient, nutritional information, even taste and texture. Want a chicken dish that’s spicy, requires only one pot and has fewer than 500 calories per serving? Cookstr offers up 16 recipes, including West African chicken stew and a Thai green curry.
The company has extended the reach of this highly personal, on-demand approach to actual cookbooks, packaging the well-known “1-2-3” series of three-ingredient cookbooks from award-winning author Rozanne Gold into 32 different digital books for iPhones and iPads. Sold through Apple’s iBookstore, recipes can be purchased in bundles of 10, 50 or 250, allowing buyers to build their own a la carte recipe collections.
And cooks seem to be responding to these new digital options. Cookstr has grown from 12,000 users when it launched nearly three years ago to about 250,000 unique visitors a month, Chang says.
Meanwhile, anticipation of the digital dining revolution has prompted designers of applications or “apps” — the programs that run on mobile phones and tablets such as the iPad — to add features that go beyond simple ingredient searches and shopping list creation to elements such as “push” notices that send daily recipes to your device, “shuffle” functions that create new menus from the same tranche of recipes, ingredient substitution options and comprehensive videos on tips and techniques.
CulinApp, a Houston-based application development company, plans to offer products that couple cookbook content from well-known chefs and authors with high-definition video personalized to the individual user’s preferences — cookbook meets on-demand cooking show.
The company’s just-released first app combines 24 recipes from baking expert Dorie Greenspan’s bestselling cookbook, Baking: From My Home to Yours, with comprehensive video of every step in every recipe. Text can be viewed in four different formats, from traditional cookbook page to a flowchart of ingredients and steps. The video can be consumed whole or broken into individual parts, called “spin view,” depending on what the user wants. When the user finishes making the recipe, a timer function keeps track of the baking time.
“There are a lot of people out there who are intimidated by baking,” says Laurie Woodward, founder of the online community Tuesdays with Dorie, which has spent the past four years baking its way through the hardcopy of Greenspan’s cookbook. “This is a really great way to introduce people to baking who are more visual.”
If the new technologies are changing the way people cook, they’re also changing the way authors write. Greenspan says the app allows her to offer tips and advice that she couldn’t in a printed cookbook — for instance, demonstrating what “room temperature” butter looks like (it should hold a fingerprint). Greenspan says it also forced her to re-think her recipes and communicate them in a different way.
“If you beat the butter and sugar and eggs and flour, what do you call that in spin view?” she says. “It challenged me to do things that I never do, to dissect the recipe, reconstruct it and to keep in mind ‘Will it make sense? Will it track?’”
However, book lovers need not mourn the death of print just yet. Van Leunen says the site actually has inspired her to buy more books. And social media expert Natanya Anderson says the on-demand nature of sites like Cookstr will allow people to explore cuisines more efficiently and cost effectively than buying a whole cookbook.
However, what does appear in print likely will change.
“In 10 years we’ll find very specific kinds of things that are important to have in print, whether it’s a glossy magazine for the holidays or gorgeous cookbooks that are memorable, and then this whole other class of content that’s about getting dinner on the table,” says Anderson, senior social media manager for Whole Foods Market Inc and a veteran developer of online communities. “And I’m okay with that. If there’s more cooking information available to more people at price points and in more formats that they can utilize, then that’s a win for everybody.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts