App Review: Great British Chefs Kids – so many delicious pictures

Great British Chefs Kids Recipes Apps

Great British Chefs

Free on Apple iOS

As someone who has always disliked cooking but loved food, recipes fill me with mixed feelings.

The delicious pictures, but oh, the long lists of things you have to do in order to achieve said delicacies!  As such, I approached the app with interest, since an app for kids surely meant easy recipes not involving unfathomable substances such as ‘Dutch Cocoa’, ‘Milliner’s Sugar’ or ‘spices’.

The app however is aimed at children cooking with their parents, meaning the adults have the main operations in hand. The recipes are not particularly easy – even those in the ‘easy’ category.  It is entirely possible I’m a philistine, but I’ve never commonly used pollenta, cardemom, sunflower oil and the like, and therefore don’t have them lying about my house. It may be different for more sophisticated, or domesticated, types.  

The recipes are divided into two categories (‘Easy’ and ‘Medium’) which are themselves full of a range of difficulties – some of the easy recipes are more like medium and some of the medium recipes seem kinda hard.  There are three sections, with photos and hints; a summary, the ingredients needed (with a link to shopping online at Tesco and the ability to add selected ingredients to a list) and the method.  Often, the summary will contain a helpful video on a certain step of the cooking process, catered for kids; word to the wise, don’t watch the ‘How to melt chocolate’ video when on a diet.

There are a large number of varied recipes, which can also be selected by course, category and inspiration, as well as by chef (with a run down about the chef).  The recipe I tried was easy, mainly because I skipped out half the steps by replacing home-made buns with shop bought buns. The resulting Turkey mince burgers were not very nice, unfortunately, so much so I will be recycling the remaining patties instead of using them for further burger efforts.

The app is beautifully and simply laid out, with great, salivation-inducing pictures and a lot of helpful extras, such as the videos and the hints.  However, as an app for kids cooking with parents, I think some more simple recipes would have been better; that way, the adult can take a supervisory role and let the kid read out and complete most of the recipe. This isn’t just laziness speaking – it’s nice when you’re a kid to do things yourself and try and impress your parents.  Admittedly, this can sometimes result in hairy cakes (don’t ask) but with Mum or Dad helping in the background, it should be possible to avoid these occurrences. As it is, this app will likely always require an adult to help, for children under 12.  As it is, many of the steps are a bit complicated and therefore off-putting.

There are some great ideas for kids, such as pizza hearts, chicken lollipops (a disgusting sounding recipe but a neat idea) and the aforementioned turkey burgers – it’s just sometimes, the steps required to make these are quite involved and the ingredients sometimes a little obscure.  So while the app itself is a good offering, for its purported function of encouraging kids to cook, I feel it could have been better.

The app is free, however, and contains more than 100 recipes by my reckoning with a variety of courses. There are also in-built extras such as a timer for each recipe, the ability to make notes and use voice control to move from one step to the next.