New app delivers Michelin-star secrets to regular home cooks

(Apple)

From roasted plum tomato soup to pan-fried mackerel with chorizo-braised leeks and shallot crisps, a new app has been designed to deliver the secrets of Michelin-starred chefs from across the UK into regular home kitchens.

Launched last week, the Great British Chefs app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch is designed to help amateur home cooks recreate haute cuisine meals with its collection of 180 recipes from 12 chefs who, between them, hold 15 Michelin stars.

Chefs like Martin Wishart, Marcus Wareing and Tom Aikens lent some of their award-winning recipes to the app, allowing users to build three-course menus - appetizer, entrée and dessert - from one or several different chefs.

Amateur chefs could start with Wishart's recipe of warm cheese fondants, apple and walnut salad, for example, before moving on to Wareing's stuffed spiced pork belly with roasted vegetables, or his equally enticing pan-fried mackerel with chorizo-braised leeks and shallot crisps.

For the finale, users can choose among Aikens' list of desserts like a lemon rice pudding with a confit of plums or spicy plum fritters.

Each recipe is brought to life in full color photographs, allowing fastidious amateur cooks to replicate gourmet restaurant meals on their own dinnerware.

The app allows users to search recipes by ingredient, course or chef. A voice control function also allows users to cook hands-off.

'How-to' video tutorials teach home chefs kitchen techniques like how to butcher a duck, prepare an artichoke, fillet a fish, and for the really ambitious cook, how to make foam with a gas canister.

Meanwhile, Mark Bittman's popular app How to Cook Everything was also recently updated to include metric conversions of temperatures and measurements.

For more info on the UK app, visit http://www.greatbritishchefs.com/.

Great British Chefs costs $6.99 and is available in iTunes.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chef-recipes/id448261085?mt=8&ls=1%20#