Culinary Fundamentals at Mac App Store analyse

Ive got to work in Florida now but my wife has to stay in her job in Ohio. That means Im on my own. My cooking skills are minimal, and I desperately need help in making healthy and inexpensive meals. I found this app for my iMac, and it is fantastic. I am now learning some of the very basic techniques and steps in cooking. Im also finding out that Ive been doing many things wrongly and ruining the nutritional value of certain foods as well as reducing flavor. This app is a must for the non-cooking husband whos out on his own for the first time. Bravo!

The concept for this app is great and the videos are helpful. My main problem is with the price. Almost all of the videos are only 20 - 30 seconds long and as a result seem a little rushed as well as leave out information. For example, the roasted garlic video says to put the garlic in the oven until golden brown, but no temperature or general time is mentioned. In the fruit section there is a video for tomato wedges but nothing for diced tomatoes, which is pretty common. I know I sound like Im nitpicking, but there should definitely be more content and more detailed videos for the price of the app seeing as how much of it can be obtained from the internet for free. Right now Id say the app is worth more like $5 instead of $11. I do like the meat section however as the videos are longer and cover some good topics. Add more videos with more detail, and Ill improve my rating.

Im currently in culinary school at Johnson and Wales University, and were required to make extremely precise knife cuts. Learning to become really fast at all the knife cuts can be difficult without seeing little tricks on how to turn vegetables after each cut, and so on. The videos in this app are great, and although I agree that there are occasions where it doesnt go into detail enough (like oven temperatures), it shows some really fine detail in other places. It has a couple dozen videos on various ways to cut fruit which give really good ideas for garnishes. The app is also excellently organized… separating methods, fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood, poultry, and other tips. I think its a great buy if youre interested in learning traditional ways of performance in the kitchen.

In fact, lets do that: it could support full screen mode in lion, or resizing the window, it could contain links to more information elsewhere online. The videos are often ridiculously short, and the action seems to be sped up-- just the opposite of what youd want. Its clearly a quick port of the iPad app-- some time spent looking at best-of-breed mac apps would do the developer good, it simply doesnt feel at home on the mac. The content seems OK-- I feel like there could be more depth. Imagine if each technique was accompanied by a few recipes that use it, or even just links to relevant wikipedia articles, or provided a space for discussion.