The Italian cooking course starts with fundamentals like: how to use garlic and how to make the perfect pasta sauce. The course then progresses to recipes like: how to make the perfect meatball, risotto, and chicken parmesan.

Each lesson has a video as well as written instructions which are also linked to corresponding timecodes in the video. You can watch the whole video or jump to these points as you work your way through the recipe. The chefs explain the technical and scientific processes of each step and offer very helpful tips. For instance, I discovered a quick way to mince garlic: simply peel the clove, put a bit of salt on your cutting board, dice the clove on top and rub the pieces of garlic and salt together with the broad side of your knife. The salt helps cut the garlic and within minutes I had a garlic paste.

There are other perks too, like a chef hotline where you can send urgent questions to Salted’s culinary team. The response time, they say, will be under 30 minutes. However, nowadays most kitchen questions are also answerable by a quick Google search. Also, Salted is a paid service. There’s a free 30-day trial but you begin paying almost $10 per month afterwards. For that money, the photos on the website could be better (some were snapped in poor lighting) and the videos could provide even more detail. While I was following a video on how to make chicken parmesan, I was told to “butterfly” a chicken breast, but I had to stop the video and search on Google to figure out how to correctly perform that task.

Salted is only available online, and not as an app for your tablet or smartphone.

America’s Test Kitchen: Cook’s Illustrated

The Cook’s Illustrated iPad app is very similar to the magazine, but with extra features. Photo: Angela Johnston

I’ve been using America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Illustrated recipes for years, so I was excited to discover they also had an iPad app. The app is simply a digital version of the magazine, with extra features helpful to a home cook looking to improve his or her skills. The photos, at first, appear black and white, but slowly turn color. Each master recipe also has a video attached to it, which guides you step-by-step through the cooking process. I was ambitious and tried to make the Mu Shu Pork and pancakes from scratch, a recipe in the March/April edition of Cook’s Illustrated. The video was helpful, but when I got to a difficult spot, I found myself replaying certain spots over and over again. Then, I discovered the special “cooking mode slideshow” that broke the recipe down into individual slides and color photos for every step. The instructions were accurate, and the dish turned out well, but the specialized steps it took me almost 2 hours to prepare. I should’ve signed up for America’s Test Kitchen's Cooking School, which offers similar courses to Salted, as well as skill-testing review sections and equipment reviews.

The Cook’s Illustrated app is available for iOS. You can download the iPad app for free, but you have to choose to pay for a monthly subscription, or buy each magazine individually. The iPhone app is free, but only features 50 recipes. America’s Test Kitchen Cooking School has a free 14-day trial. Otherwise, it costs 19.95 per month or $179.95 per year.

ChefSteps

ChefSteps highlights difficult recipes, like how to create balls of flavor using the spherification technique. Photo: ChefSteps

ChefSteps is definitely one of the most elite cooking-school apps out there. Based in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, the recipes and courses range from topics like how to make a black pepper soufflé and how to get your chicken liver paté just right, to how to make sous-vide pork belly (http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/sous-vide-pork-belly). The photos are beautiful, and the videos are non-narrated, you follow them by reading basic subtitles. You have to pay for most ChefSteps classes, and they range from $5 to $18. There are some classes you can take for free, like one on the “three fundamental techniques of spherification," a modernist technique that can be used to turn any flavorful liquid into spheres, but the average home cook won’t have the materials or ingredients in their pantry (you need things like sodium alginate or calcium lactate gluconate).

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