Paperless Cookbooks - What Will They Think up Next? (Eat My Words - Apr 17, 2009)

I’ve seen the future of cookbooks, and paper is not involved. Well, all right, maybe it’s just one version of the future, but it’s intriguing. There are two of these on-line books out so far, from the Keeper Collection. One of them was done for the Wine & Food Foundation of Texas, in Austin. The other is for chef David Bull,  named Bull’s Eye on Food. (You remember Bull: he cooked at the Driskill Grill in Austin, won a slot on Food & Wine’s “ten best new chefs” list, competed on Iron Chef America, and is now chef at Bolla, the fancy Italian restaurant in the Stoneleigh Hotel in Dallas.) I clicked my way through his book today and pretty much liked the features: You can change the number of servings automatically (the book recalculates the amounts of ingredients for you). You can use it to print out a shopping list (or send the list to your PDA)–and the list will be arranged the way a supermarket is. (For instance, all the dairy products will be grouped together; all the condiments will be together.)  You can even create a menu of several dishes from the book and the list feature will combine all the ingredients and let you print out one shopping list for all of them. There’s a glossary, too, for pesky terms like “farina 00 flour” (no kidding). Oh, I almost forgot, there are recipes–80 on Bull’s site. You get them if you spring for the book, which is $34.95. Check it out; there’s a video on the site. Pretty neat.