By Erin L. Cox

Two things that don’t naturally go together are food and computers, but yesterday’s “Cooking Digital, Digital Cooking” in the Gourmet Gallery shared some innovative new ways to bring the experience of cooking online.

Panelists Patrik Jaros, a Michelin-starred chef, and Rocco Georgi, co-founder and developer of PavingWays, have both created applications for smartphones. Jaros, author of some forty cookbooks, created an application that would download his recipes to any smartphone and, with the transportability of this device versus a cookbook, make searching for recipes while shopping for ingredients much more convenient. Georgi took a different path: his application includes recipes and a game component to help teach novice chefs how to cook.

The third panelist, Suzanne Koranyi-Esser of Reader’s Digest and Allrecipes.com offered her perspectives as a publisher of both cookbooks and a recipe site. Questioned whether there is concern that a recipe site would poach sales from Reader’s Digest’s cookbook line, Koranyi-Esser said, “I think the two markets will co-exist…We must create tailor-made content for people in the way they want it—print, digital, or print-on-demand.”

All three panelists agreed that, no matter what the method of delivery of recipes, it is all about the content. With increased ability to show beautiful photography on smartphones, the shots of finished dishes are just as much of an enticement to buyers of these applications as they are to buyers of cookbooks.

Sadly, Georgi noted that, while the digital aspect of all of their applications and websites make cooking easy and may draw a new audience of cooks, there was still no digital solution for doing dishes.