What it's like to (virtually) cook with the Pioneer Woman
Food Network wants to move from your TV to the kitchen.
The cooking-centric channel last month debuted Food Network Kitchen, an app that combines a library of its shows and recipes with live cooking classes taught by its famous chefs. You can make pancakes on Sunday morning with Bobby Flay or Thanksgiving stuffing with Alex Guarnaschelli, asking questions about best practices along the way. The app ($6.99/month) also allows you to order ingredients for the recipes.
It's an ambitious way for the network to evolve as Americans change how they cook and where they get their food content, be it Netflix's food competition series or the delightful YouTube library from Bon Appétit magazine. Now, instead of just watching Ina Garten roast her famous chicken, you can ask her about the one you're roasting at home alongside her.
But how easy and practical is it to actually cook in real time with a professional chef? How watchable is it? Is it a better option than all those food blogs I find when I google "easy chicken dinners"?
As a hobby cook and TV critic, I wanted to find out just how good the new app is, both for cooking and entertainment.
First I had to pick a recipe. I have dietary restrictions requiring the Ketogenic diet, so it was a little difficult to find a meal with a live cooking class that would work for me (the only diet with its own section is vegetarianism). I settled with a replay of a class with Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman), who taught me how to make "Lower Carb Eggs Benedict," because I've never made the signature breakfast dish before. If Food Network Kitchen is going to be effective at teaching cooking, it has to get me to a halfway-decent hollandaise and poached eggs, at least as well as "The Joy of Cooking" would.
After choosing my recipe, I tried to use the app's integrated shopping function, which allows you to order the ingredients of your recipe through Instacart, Amazon Fresh or Peapod. This didn't work so well for me. I'm a frequent Instacart user, yet the integration never opened the Instacart app on my phone, only the mobile website in a Safari browser window. It also didn't translate all the ingredients correctly (eggs somehow became egg noodles) and I had to delete pantry staples I already had, such as white vinegar and salt. I ended up ordering the ingredients manually through Instacart as I would for any other recipe.
Two hours later, I had my supplies and my stove ready to go. I brought my iPad into the kitchen, pulled up Drummond's course and began. I prepped all of the ingredients as directed on the class page (separated eggs, melted butter, minced garlic). But after I pressed play, I discovered Drummond had prepped some items but chopped others during the class. She also had a pot of water already simmering for poaching eggs, which I didn't, and I had to pause the lesson to avoid falling behind.
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As someone who usually reads recipes once or twice before I start cooking, just following Drummond's verbal instructions was scary – you want to look at the screen without burning yourself – but ultimately successful. Drummond walked me through two tasks – making hollandaise and poaching eggs – that are notoriously tricky for home cooks. But for me, they were easy, and achieved on the first try. She didn't move too fast, although the number of steps she did at once – such as leaving the bacon to brown on the stove while blending the hollandaise – was more than I usually do. But I'm happy to try to pick up this time-saving habit.
Some key parts of the recipe appear on-screen but are left out of the verbal instructions: At what heat to sauté the kale that replaces the English muffin, or how much white vinegar to add to the egg-poaching water. They were a little too easy to miss, and I had to rewind the video twice to make sure I was on the right track. However, if I incorporated this kind of cooking into my everyday life, I'm pretty sure I could adapt to paying attention to the screen when necessary.
Overall, I burned nothing, consumed no raw eggs or meat, and finished almost at the same time as the professional chef. I'm almost ashamed to admit that keeping up with Drummond gave me a slightly greater sense of satisfaction than just following any old recipe. I didn't just cook; I cooked professionally. And, critically, my dish tasted delicious when I ate it for lunch.
Other than the classes, the app is a lot of fun to play with. It offers many videos you can see in other places (on TV or Instagram) that are classic Food Network, but the best videos are the kitchen-specific ones, whether or not you catch them live.
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They have a laid back, loosey-goosey vibe, from a producer shouting audience questions at the chefs off-mic to how frequently the chefs mess up while multitasking. It offers a more real view of their personalities that hyperedited TV shows and shiny, slick Instagram posts lack. Flay gets adorably flustered when he drops an egg. Guarnaschelli cheekily blames audience members when she burns toast.
As a one stop-shop for all my cooking needs, the app doesn't get it all done. It lacks the ability to bookmark recipes for later use, despite its big library. And although Thanksgiving is on everyone's mind, it's a bit too holiday-centric right now, with other types of meals not as prominently featured.
Inevitably, Food Network Kitchen isn't all that revolutionary. It's really just a combination of Facebook Live and Pinterest. But that's not a bad thing! The internet has given rise to an incredible number of recipes, blogs, videos and hacks for home cooking, and trying to find something to make for dinner on a Tuesday can be overwhelming. The app offers a clean, easy-to-use, and most importantly, fun way to spice up getting dinner on the table.
If you're already paying for a meal kit, online cookbook or similar service, your money won't buy you much. But if you adore all things Food Network and love to cook, the price tag might be worth it.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Food Network Kitchen app: Will it revolutionize home cooking?
