Cooking can be scary. There’s fire, knives, and lots and lots of dead things.
And the idea of doing it spontaneously, without hours of planning and preparation? Shudder to think.
Renowned chef Sarah Jenkins of NYC’s Porchetta and Porsena respectfully disagrees – and created her app New Italian Pantry to officially put an end to premeditated cooking.
First, she selected her sixteen most-used ingredients – stuff with a long shelf life like olive oil, dried pasta, and Aleppo pepper. Then she packed the interactive cookbook with 75-plus recipes based on those staples.
So stock your shelves, then generate recipe suggestions by either telling the app what you already have or going to the grocery store and basing dinner on whatever is fresh. Each recipe comes equipped with videos, photographs, auto-generated shopping lists, and built-in timers for soup-to-nuts hand-holding.
Just don’t expect it to do your mise en place.