The round was led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and included participation from Vocap Ventures, Zelkova Ventures and Gary Vaynerchuk. Lerer Ventures, 15 Angels and investor Joanne Wilson, who had also participated in the company’s $750,000 seed round in 2010, contributed to this round as well.

Betabeat actually reported the news about the funding round back in January when a Series D form was filed with the SEC.

On the Food52 blog, Hesser and Stubbs write about their plans for the funding:

“Over the next year, we’ll be improving our user experience for all mobile devices. We have a great new shop, unlike any other, in the works. And we’ll be expanding our publishing platform through an innovative partnership with Random House, Inc., which publishes renowned food writers Ina Garten, Alice Waters, and Yotam Ottolenghi.”

Food52 has already published two cookbooks with HarperCollins’ William Morrow. Hesser said that the company will have more to share about its new publishing plans soon.

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Evernote

I’m storing the recipes themselves in Evernote (which has also been my main tool overall in going paperless). I have a Premium subscription which, for $45 a year, lets me upload 1 GB of files per month — more than enough to store all the recipes I have now, along with new ones in the future. I use the Evernote Chrome extension to “clip” recipes from the web and save them with lots of tags. Evernote also offers Optical Character Recognition, so when I have to scan in a recipe (more on that below) its text also becomes searchable.

Evernote’s not the only recipe-storing option: My colleague Kevin Fitchard, who’s written a lot about tech, food and the challenges of storing digital recipes, uses the Paprika app (Mac, iOS and Android) for capturing recipes from the web. MacGourmet and KeepRecipes offer similar services, and Pinterest just acquired Punchfork, a service that aggregates culinary ideas and recipes across the web.

Fujitsu ScanSnap for Mac

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M is a splurge ($419.99 on Amazon) that I shelled out for because it can scan a lot of double-sided paper really fast. That’s useful for going paperless in general and for scanning, say, stacks of old tax returns, but it’s not necessarily so handy for recipes: Most of the recipes I’ve saved are little pieces of paper clipped from magazines, and although the ScanSnap can usually handle them fine, it’s easier to just find them online and save them to Evernote (for more on the recipes I find online, see below). I use the ScanSnap for recipes that aren’t duplicated elsewhere (index cards from my grandma, for instance).

Smartphone scanning app

I’m simultaneously trying to cut down on my big print cookbook collection, and a smartphone scanning app lets me save individual recipes from those books (I’ve found that many of them contain only a few recipes that I want to make regularly) without tearing out pages. That way I can sell or donate the cookbooks undamaged. I’ve been using the DocScanner iPhone app ($4.99) for this, but it’s clunky to use and a recent upgrade made it worse, so I’ll probably switch to the well-reviewed ScannerPro app for iOS ($6.99).

Epicurious, CooksIllustrated.com, NYTimes.com

The bulk of the recipes in my recipe file come from four publications: Bon Appétit, the now-defunct Gourmet, Cook’s Illustrated magazine and the New York Times . But there’s no reason to save those recipes in print — or to scan the print versions — when most of them are available free online. Epicurious has almost all the recipes from Bon Appetit and Gourmet and NYTimes.com has recipes going back for years, so all I have to do is Google the recipe’s title, pull up the page and Evernote it. (I usually Evernote the print view to avoid saving a bunch of unneeded sidebars and images.) Cook’s Illustrated‘s recipes are also all online, though they’re behind a paywall; I bought a CookIllustrated.com membership ($34.95 per year) and I’m now Evernoting all the recipes I clipped from the print magazine over the years.

So far my recipe file digitization project has been more time-consuming than I’d imagined it would be, but I’m already seeing the benefits. The Evernote notebook where I keep my recipes may not be as fun to browse through as my old paper recipe file, but having the recipes in a searchable digital format makes it a lot easier to actually remember what I’ve saved. Tags are especially helpful: Unlike in a physical recipe file, where a recipe can only go in one pocket, Evernote lets you store a single recipe under both, say, “Thanksgiving” and “vegetarian main course.”

The system’s not perfect. In some ways, it’s still easier to cook from a piece of paper than from a digital device — though there are certainly plenty of iPad kitchen shields out there. There are a few family recipes I want to keep as physical objects, so I’m saving a few old, kitchen-spattered index cards as keepsakes. But I’m scanning them, too — that way, I won’t ever lose them. My giant turquoise recipe file isn’t gone yet, but at least it’s getting slimmer, and the day will come when I can get rid of it all together.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Jiri Hera

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In an interview with food blog Serious Eats, Brown gave his thoughts on how social media is changing the way the world approaches the rarefied art of recipe writing. Recipes used to immalleable creations, published in cookbooks and magazines or printed on index cards. But with the rise of the internet and social media, recipes are often adjusted, reformulated and repurposed within minutes of being published.

The recipe, Brown said, has become like open-source code. The programmers in this case are cooks and they’re constantly tweaking and improving the code and tossing it back to developer community. If you want an example just look to Food52, a crowdsourced cooking portal where any given recipe is posted by individuals, but then tinkered with by Food52’s community of cooks.

Brown said that trend shouldn’t just be accepted but embraced to create a new kind of digital recipe. “What if each recipe per se had three paths to completion, and you got to choose your path based on what kind of person you are and how you interact with things?” Brown asked. Apparently Brown has a project that will do just that in the works. I for one am very curious to see what he comes up with.

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In fact, the week before Thanksgiving Allrecipes recorded 12 million sessions from a mobile browser or app, up 97 percent from the same week the previous year. Home cooks aren’t just using the internet as a valuable culinary tool, they’re using their smartphones and tablets to bring that tool directly into kitchen. They aren’t just searching for recipes either. They’re often looking for instructions on cooking techniques. That week 1.6 million visitors watched instructional videos on the Allrecipes sites, an increase of 200 percent over last year.

Allrecipes wasn’t the only online cooking resource to have a big Thanksgiving. Crowdsourced recipe portal Food52 saw inquiries to its Hotline mobile and web cooking questions app jump 147 percent the week of Thanksgiving as compared to its usual traffic levels. Its recipe page views increased 82 percent for the same period.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

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For most of us, Thanksgiving is about football, beer and arguing politics with Uncle Mike. But for the cook in kitchen, it can be an extremely stressful ordeal. Preparing a huge meal for a dozen people on a tight timeline is hard enough as it is, but doing so under the critical gaze of your mother-in-law and with kids are scurrying underfoot, it can be impossible.

Luckily there’s help on the other side of your PC, tablet or smartphone screen. Here are three apps that can help ease the stress of creating a holiday meal and might even help you avert a Thanksgiving culinary catastrophe.

Food52 Hotline

Last November, hundreds of home cooks gave thanks to Amanda Hesser, Merrill Stubbs and the gaggle of dedicated cooks at Food52. Together the group saved a lot of holiday meals from disaster with a service called Hotline, which you can think of as digital version of the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, except its scope isn’t limited to the preparation of oversized poultry.

You can ask Hotline a question by posting on the Food52 website, via its iPhone app or by tweeting directly at the @food52hotline Twitter account. The format allows you to ask detailed questions about general cooking topics or specific recipes. Food52 editors will parse the questions and forward them to the site’s contributors based on fields of expertise. Chances are, one of Food52’s 50,000 crowdsourced contributors will get back to you within the half hour. If you mark the question as urgent (i.e. you’re eyeing the fire extinguisher), you may hear back within minutes.

Anyone looking for a little extra help may want to invest in Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, an iPad cookbook app that pretty much breaks down every aspect of hosting a holiday party and cooking dinner into all of its component parts. The recipes are not only detailed, but the techniques are illustrated with photos, diagrams and often how-to videos. What’s more, if you run into a problem, you can access Hotline right from the app.

CookingPlanit

So you’re a neophyte in the kitchen, but for some reason you agreed to host Thanksgiving this year. You don’t just need recipes and advice, you need someone holding your hand in the kitchen. You might be the ideal candidate for Cooking Planit, a new culinary app available for the iOS devices that is pretty much the closest thing you can get to a digital cooking assistant.

CookingPlanit guides you through every aspect of meal planning from shopping for groceries and prep work to timing your roast’s stay in the oven. It doesn’t matter how inept or careless or distracted you are, Cooking Planit doesn’t leave anything to chance. It even tells you when to take breaks.

The Austin-based startup launched only this summer so it’s building up its recipe library and features. Right now, its biggest drawback for holiday meal planning is it can only scale recipes to six servings, so if you’re planning on hosting a big dinner, you might want to give Cooking Planit some time to mature.

That said, if you’re looking to start out small and simple, CookingPlanit’s in-house chef Emily Wilson has prepared two simple Thanksgiving menus (though neither includes a whole roast turkey). The app allows you to mix and match recipes to create your own menus. The cooking assistant then crunches the ingredients and instructions to create a detailed shopping list and dinner-day game plan. You just need to show up and do what your iPad tells you to do.

BigOven RecipeScan

Meals don’t get any more traditional than Thanksgiving dinner, and that means a lot of us are cooking from old family recipes that are hand-printed on index cards, jotted down in notebooks or scrawled in the margins of cookbooks. BigOven’s RecipeScan service can’t improve upon those recipes, but it can produce digital versions, making the Thanksgiving grocery shopping, meal planning and cooking a lot easier.

BigOven does this not through fancy algorithms or handwriting-deciphering software; rather it uses Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourced internet labor marketplace. Basically BigOven is hiring people to translate your chicken scratch handwriting into digital text as well as into semantic food data that Big Oven’s recipe aggregation and meal-planning engine can parse. BigOven will convert any recipe you capture with its iPhone, Android or Windows Phone app, even if you snap a photo out of a magazine or cookbook. You can then combine your recipes with other digital recipes from BigOven’s libraries and those you “clip” from Websites into a universal recipe box.

The first three scans are free, after which customers can buy scans in bundles or at 59 cents a pop. Since human labor is involved, the process takes a few days, so it’s bit late to digitize this year’s Thanksgiving menu, but it’s never too early to start planning next year’s.

Poultry image courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

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In its Measuring Cup online poll, the cooking site found that 35 percent of online cooks used smartphones to look up recipes. While recipe research was by far the most common smartphone activity, cooks are using the handheld gadgets to do a lot more inside and outside the kitchen: 29 percent said they have used their phones to photograph finished dishes, 18 percent created digital shopping lists with apps like Grocery IQ and Ziplist, 16 percent redeemed digital coupons at the grocery store and 12 percent used the phone to share a recipe on a social media site.

The number of people using smartphones to watch cooking videos is still small at just 15 percent, but on the PC and tablet, streamed video has exploded among women (Many of the poll results only include women since not enough men responded to form a suitable statistical sample).  Allrecipe’s first Measuring Cup report in 1999 found that 45 percent of women watched cooking videos online. In 2012, that number increased to 74 percent. Furthermore, nearly half of respondent believed that in 15 years how-to videos would become the primary media for conveying culinary knowledge – replacing Mom.

Here are some other interesting tidbits from the report:

• The most popular digital culinary resources weren’t cooking portals like Allrecipes or Food Network, but search engines, according to 43 percent of online cooks. Recipe sites were a close second, though, at 42 percent. The number one search term, you guessed it, was “chicken”.
• Digital cuisine is a big business: citing eMarketer, Allrecipes said consumer packaged good advertising spend online is increasing from $134 million in 200 to a projected $3.6 billion in 2012.
• Allrecipes found that mindshare in online cooking is drifting to more general social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter. One third of female cooks polled said it was important that cooking portals keep up by integrating with those big social networks.
• Expectations are high that more of the shopping and meal planning process will become digital: a majority of respondents stated that in 15 years the paper coupon will become extinct, the digital wallet will replace the leather billfold and that groceries will be ordered online and delivered to the home.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the report, however, is its more subtle findings on how the digital media have changed our views of the hallowed recipe and cookbook. Paradoxically the internet has made finding recipes far easier but it’s also destroyed our faith in the recipe itself.

Forty-four percent of men and women polled named Cooking websites as their preferred cooking resource, compared to 19 percent who said cookbooks and 9 percent who said their parents. However, confidence in the recipe has degraded. In 1999, Allrecipe’s poll found that 73 percent of online cooks said recipes made cooking easier. In 2012, only 35 percent returned the same response.

The Internet may be democratizing cooking – anyone can circulate a recipe widely and anyone can publish a cookbook. But let’s face it, there are a lot of bad recipes out there, and there’s growing trend to emphasize the aesthetics of food over the quality of the recipes behind them (The study found that the top reason for sharing recipes online was “attractive photos”). Sites like Pinterest have made cooking an artfully presented aspirational pursuit, but in many ways it’s turned the internet into a gigantic coffee table cookbook – a collection of pretty pictures and lush descriptions backed up by unvetted, incomplete and often awful recipes.

As always, though, the internet will adapt. Not only have sophisticated online review engines helped distinguish good recipes from bad, many sites such as Food52 have emerged that take crowdsourced approaches to testing and refining recipes. Allrecipes itself has long allowed its community to customize any recipe submitted to the site, and in many cases those customized recipes have become more popular than the originals, according to an Allrecipes spokesperson. Maybe we can have our democracy, but also a little bit of quality control as well.

Allrecipes, which was recently acquired by Meredith, polled roughly 2,200 people, about half of which were Allrecipes members and the other half online panelists taken from other, often non-cooking, sites. Very few men participated in the poll, so on questions where more than 200 men participated, their results were included, the spokesperson said.

All graphics courtesy of Allrecipes.com

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The Escoffier School for Culinary Arts has one hell of a namesake to live up to. Auguste Escoffier is the closest thing the cooking world has to a deity. He established the brigade system that governs all modern-day professional kitchens. His pivotal Le Guide Culinaire codified French cuisine’s five mother sauces, from which all other sauces derive. The Escoffier School’s owners believe they can now impart some of the grand master’s wisdom to a new generation of cooks through an intensive online course.

Triumph Higher Education, which licenses the school’s name from the Escoffier Foundation, already has two brick-and-mortar professional cooking schools in Austin, Texas, and Boulder, Co. But it just launched its online curriculum, modeling it after the online degree programs such as those offered by the University of Phoenix. The course costs $5,000, and while half of its new enrollment comprises enthusiasts looking to learn the basics of cooking, the school’s core objective is to train the professional cooks that make up the rank and file of every restaurant kitchen.

At this point I should mention I worked as a prep and line cook for several years in college. I had no formal training, and I’m certainly no chef, but I make a decent vinaigrette, can debone a chicken, and have developed an unhealthy indifference toward open flame. I also carry the same baggage anyone who has learned to cook in a restaurant accrues.

Sure, your grandma can teach you to cook, but to learn how to cook professionally, there is no substitute for a hairy man in sweat-drenched chef whites bellowing in your ear, demanding to know how you could f#@k up a carrot brunoise.

Auguste Escoffier

I expressed my skepticism to Jeffrey Larson, Triumph’s director of admissions marketing, and Brian Sherrill, its VP of technology, and they said they get that a lot. Cooking is such a hands-on profession that an entirely online curriculum seems counterintuitive, said Sherrill.

But Sherrill said no one is going to graduate from the school’s two-to-four-month program and open their own restaurant. The idea is to teach the rudiments of cooking along with a healthy dose of French culinary theory and kitchen science to students wanting to start out a restaurant career, he said. Triumph expects its Escoffier graduates will develop the basic knowledge needed to land an entry-level position in a restaurant or caterer’s kitchen, where they can complete their education on the job.

“You’re not going to complete the class and become a sous-chef,” Sherrill said. “You’re going to learn knife skills, to learn your mother sauces, to learn the fundamentals.”

That’s a fair point. There is a word for a new kitchen worker who doesn’t know how to cut an onion. That word is dishwasher.

Diving into the curriculum

Triumph gave me access to the program’s first few modules, and I spent two hours one night skimming through the coursework. I must admit I was surprised at the level of detail. For instance there’s a whole module dedicated to egg cookery. Not only is it replete with diagrams and videos detailing the proper techniques in hard-boiling, soft-boiling, frying, scrambling and poaching eggs, the curriculum goes into minute detail about the chemical reactions that cause whites and yolks to coagulate when heated. It then demonstrates how those reactions can be manipulated through applying different levels of heat.

There are little quizzes spread throughout the modules, but they are frankly a bit surficial (matching up a picture of paring knife with the words “paring knife”). The real challenges, however, come in the form of 36 cooking assessments, where students must actually cook what they have learned.

For instance, in the egg module students have to cook a French herbed omelette. You’re given a recipe and several videos demonstrating the technique as well as detailed instructions on prep and plating. The student is expected to document his work from beginning to end with a digital camera. Those photos are then viewed by the student’s chef-mentor (who is available throughout the course to answer questions and give advice). That mentor rates the dish, and if it proves acceptable the photo is included in the student’s portfolio and submitted to prospective employers when the student graduates.

What about taste?

The most obvious flaw in the school’s online system is no instructor is eating the dishes these students create. No matter how good it looks, if it tastes like crap, then you’ve made an unacceptable dish. I shared this criticism with Sherrill and Larson, expecting them to cringe in fear at my astute observations. But I got the impression I’m not the first person to ever bring this point up.

You can divine an awful lot about how a dish will taste just by looking it, Sherrill said. You can tell if a scallop has been seared properly by noting the level of caramelization on its exterior. You can see if a steak has been cooked properly by cutting it up and observing the redness of juices. You can tell if eggs have been scrambled properly by the size of their curds and the sheen of moisture on their surface.

In addition, each student is expected to taste his dish and describe in detail the flavors and textures, Sherrill said. This not only gives the chef-mentor an idea of whether the dish came together properly, he added, but is also a useful tool in developing a student’s palette.

Those are valid arguments, but I’m still highly skeptical. One of the most difficult things to learn in cooking is seasoning: knowing how much salt to apply and when to apply it. It took me years — and many ruined or bland dishes — to learn how to properly season food, and I’m still working on it (and screwing up meals) to this day. If a new cook is salting everything like a McDonald’s French fry, he won’t last long in any kitchen.

Sherrill said cooks ultimately will learn those kind of refinements when they leave school and start working. Moreover, every chef has his or her own approach to seasoning, just as every chef has his or her own approach to making Escoffier’s mother sauces, Sherrill said: The school can’t teach an individual’s kitchen’s technique.

“All of the employers we talked to said we have to teach them the basics,” Sherrill said. “What they want to know is if they hand the [prospective hire] a knife, they know what do with it. They can teach the rest.”

What’s the verdict?

I’m still not convinced that you can learn cook online. However, I think anyone who wants to become a cook could learn plenty from this class, giving them a big leg up when applying for that kitchen job. The alternative would be slaving away in front of a sink and picking up prep tasks here or there until you can beg or cajole your way onto the line.

And I’m not too proud to admit I learned something. I saw a few things in the egg module I plan to try out this weekend.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user star5112; Sauté pan photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Fedor Kondratenko

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Food52 founders Amanda Hesser (left) and Merrill Stubbs

When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009 they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook. After 52 weeks (hence the name) of online recipe contests, they had the 140 dishes needed for their cookbook, but they also discovered they had inadvertently created a community of passionate home and professional cooks, all willing to share their recipes and their culinary wisdom.

Since then Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook.

In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web — sort of a Quora or Yahoo Answers for food. The idea is that anytime a cook has a question about a specific recipe, technique or general cooking topic, he or she would be able to ask that question from any cooking website – or from a mobile app or social media site – and get an answer within minutes.

Food52 has already laid out the groundwork with a service called Hotline, which Hesser describes as the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line for any food question. Cooks can ask their questions from Food52’s Website, via Twitter, through its iPhone app, or in its iPad cookbook, the Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide. Anyone can respond, as well as agree or disagree with someone else’s answer, but most of the responses come from Food52’s core membership of 50,000 highly active professional and home cooks (who account for roughly 10 percent of its 500,000 monthly unique visitors).

“Right now it’s a very solid proof of concept within our world, but you can imagine how powerful this could be if we integrated it with other sites,” Hesser said. “We want to distribute what we do around the Web. We’re building a widget that can be embedded in food blogs and sites that would expand our reach to a much wider audience.”

Whole Foods Market is already experimenting with the platform, incorporating the Hotline into a series of local food portals it’s launching across the country, rebranding the service as FoodPickle. Food52 isn’t working with any other companies or sites just yet. First, Hesser said, it needs to refine and scale its platform.

The recipe for the ultimate repository of cooking knowledge

Currently Food52 is only getting about 20–40 questions per day — though during the holidays volumes increase dramatically — a number that’s easily handled by its membership and moderated by the startup’s small staff of eight. In order to support what it eventually hopes will be thousands of questions per day, Food52 is developing an automated system for streamlining the Q&A and process, identifying which questions pertain to a particular field of cookery and pushing those queries to the relevant experts among its members. For instance, a question about a particular sourdough bread recipe would not only go into the overall question feed but would also be automatically pushed to the recipe’s author and Food52’s baking cognoscenti.

Ultimately, Hesser said, Food 52 wants to get every query answered in as close to real time as possible, because people most often have cooking questions while they’re actually cooking. A 20-minute response lag to the question “How do I know when my quiche is done?” doesn’t do you much good if your quiche is already burning.

“Over the Christmas holidays we saved a lot of meals,” Hesser said, but she added that Food52 can do better. “One challenge for us to get that critical mass of activity necessary to get questions answered in less than 5 minutes.”

Next, Food52 is trying to refine how questions are asked. While users can submit general hotline queries via its Web and app tools, Food52 is embedding code into its recipes pages that allows customers to ask questions about specific ingredients, techniques or steps described within those recipes. The engine then loads that relevant information into the posted question itself, making it easier for Food52’s members to provide specific answers. Hesser said Food52 will eventually expand those capabilities to its partners.

Food52 is also building a database of questions and highly rated answers, giving users instant access to a repository of stored knowledge about particular recipes or techniques. The more people use Hotline, the smarter it becomes, Hesser said. And finally, the startup is looking to take advantage of its higher-profile members to provide both authority and nuance to some of the more complex queries fielded by the site. Food52 has designated a group of 10 famous chefs, food writers and cookbook authors such as Michael Ruhlman and Dorie Greenspan as “MVPs.”

“There are a lot of fantastic food questions out there, but some of these questions require experience to answer,” said Hesser, who is no slouch herself (she authored the Essential New York Times Cookbook). “A lot of questions don’t have simple fact-based answers . . . The idea isn’t that what [the MVPs] have to say is necessarily more important than what others have to say, but we do want to add their knowledge to the conversation.”

Hesser didn’t reveal any details about the business model behind Food52’s expansion across the Web, though she did say the plan isn’t to provide a white-label service to other food brands. The New York City–based startup hopes to make Hotline its own pervading presence, drawing more people into the Food52 universe.

Food52 may also face some competition. In a recent conversation, Food Network’s SVP of online brand brands, Bob Madden, said FN is looking to make some big moves in its digital content strategy, including a possible cooking question-and-answer service of its own.

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It launched what can only be described as digital interactive coffee table recipe book centered on the theme of today’s hippest dessert: cupcakes. The iPad app (available for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store) is stocked with lush interactive photographs and video, designed to entice the food fetishist in us all, and while it’s full of recipes and instructive lessons, it’s an easy app to flip through, letting you swipe between one tantalizing cupcake image to the next – just like the bound food-porn tomes that grace end tables and bookstore cookbook displays around the world.

The app is slick, which immediately raises my suspicions. In general, pretty cookbooks are a waste of money – the quantity and quality of photographs in cookbooks are usually in inverse proportion to the usefulness of the recipes they illustrate. But Bob Madden, GM and SVP of online brands for Food Network and The Cooking Channel, said his team designed the app to be a useful kitchen aid as well as eye candy. FN filled the app with instructional videos demonstrating baking and frosting techniques and it tested every recipe in FN’s San Francisco New York City test kitchens.

In addition, FN isn’t just repurposing recipes and videos from its TV shows and website for the app. It contains some cupcake ideas from Alton Brown and other network personalities, and it features a section of recipes from its FN program “Cupcake Wars,” but most of its content is original. The photos and videos were shot and the recipes collected, refined and compiled specifically for the app, Madden said.

So is Food Network, which is jointly owned by Scripps Networks Interactive and the Tribune Company, building up a side business in digital cookbook publishing? Not exactly, Madden said. The app isn’t free and it does contain advertising from Food Network sponsors, but ultimately apps like “Cupcakes” — and even FN’s print cookbook business — are designed to promote the Food Network and Cooking Channel brands. You’ll probably see more efforts like “Cupcakes” to create content that exists apart from its TV programming, Madden said, but FN looks at digital content as way to expand the content available to its core TV fan base as well as create niche or segmented content it can’t offer over its cable channels.

I’ll admit, I’m not much of a baker and my tolerance for cutesy cupcakes is low, but this app is impressive. It utilizes the new capabilities of the tablet format well. For instance there’s a frosting section that let’s you scroll through a palette of different icing colors. You tap on a frosting color and a screen pops up detailing the exact proportion of colored gels necessary to reproduce it. We’re starting to see more and more interactive cookbooks designed specifically for the tablet format. Inkling’s digital version of The Professional Chef, Food52′s Holiday Recipe and Survival Guide, and Open Air Publishing’s Mixology are all good examples.

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Although there is a web version of the service, Snapguide is clearly designed to take advantage of mobile devices like the iPhone, which for many have taken the place of the manual or cookbook they look to for help with a project. The guides that users create — which can contain a combination of audio, photos and video — are formatted so they are easy to see on a small screen, and the app also makes it easy for users to browse through existing guides and to “like” or comment on them. And since the iPhone has a camera that also does video, creating a new guide is almost as easy as viewing one (the company says it is working on Android and other versions of the app).

One of the obvious categories for such easy-to-consume mobile guides is recipes and cooking, and Snapguide offers a number of those already, including some created by an award-winning chef. Cooking also played a key role in the formation of the company: the idea for Snapguide came together after chief technology officer Steve Krulewitz — a former engineer on Google Chrome — gave co-founder and CEO Daniel Raffel (a former chef and also former product lead for Yahoo Pipes) a book on bread-making. At that point, Raffel says he realized there was no easy way to create or share step-by-step instructions with photos and video for relatively simple tasks.

Although Raffel has created a number of guides himself that involve cooking — including “How to make a marinara and margherita pizza” and “How to barbecue teriyaki tofu” — he also a wide range of other fairly eclectic how-tos, including one on how to fly a dual-line kite and another on how to replace the battery in the key fob for a Prius. The service has been seeded with guides created by a number of other users as well, including Bouchon’s Chef de Cuisine Rory Herrmann, gardener and nursery owner Flora Grubb, and a beekeeper who has created a guide on how to clean and render beeswax.

Like most people, I hardly ever turn to how-to guides unless I am completely stuck — and then I usually just Google the term I am looking for (faucet dripping, etc.) and then click through whatever looks good and try to memorize the key steps. The nice thing about Snapguide isn’t just that the guides have photos and videos included, so that you can see exactly how to do something (the guide on catching Dungeness crabs is quite good) but it is really well designed for the phone and tablet. I could see myself holding the app on my iPhone or iPad — or having someone else hold it — while I try to execute whatever maneuver I am working on, or prepare a recipe for something complicated.

Snapguide, which is based in San Francisco, closed a $2-million round of funding last year from a group of venture funds, including Index Ventures and SV Angel, as well as individual investors such as former Facebook staffer Dave Morin and former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington.

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