Amanda Hesser’s Food52 Launches A Holiday Cookbook On The iPad

Two years ago New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser and her co-founder Merrill Stubbs launched Food52 to collect and test recipes in an effort to crowdsource a cookbook. It took 52 weeks to research and write the cookbook, but another full year before it was published. By the time they finished their second cookbook (yet to be published), they were convinced there had to be a better way. And there it was: the iPad.

The pair put together a digital cookbook in a matter of months called the Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, which is now available on iTunes for $9.99. I recently met up with Hesser at a sandwich shop in Manhattan, where she took me through a demo of the iPad app which you can watch in the video above.

The cookbook is built on top of Inkling, the digital textbook platform backed by Sequoia. It is packed with 75 holiday recipes, with mouth-watering pictures and instructions on everything from how to brine and truss a turkey to how to make a Gingerbread house.

If you have a question about something, you can hit the Hotline button and it will be routed to the Q&A sections of Food52’s website, where other readers can answer them. The company is also releasing a Food52 Hotline app for the iPhone, which includes only the Q&A feature.