Zeste goes cooking robot, and Facebook
A cooking robot mode that weighs everything in grams and rewrites the steps for your Thermomix, Monsieur Cuisine, Companion or Cookeo, Facebook sign-in, cookbooks you can rename, and the small things from late October.
A creamy pasta reel means a saucepan and a frying pan. With a cooking robot, it means the bowl, a speed and a temperature, or a pressure-cooking time, and you have to translate it all in your head. Starting this week, Zeste does it for you.
Cooking robot mode
Turn it on once and choose your robot: in the app, Profile › Units and cooking robot; on the web, in Settings. The ml, cl and spoons in recipes switch to grams, since it's the robot's scale that does the measuring.
Six robots are available: Thermomix TM7, TM6 and TM5, Monsieur Cuisine, Moulinex Companion and Moulinex Cookeo. Each has its own settings, checked against the manufacturers' user manuals: only the TM7 goes up to 160 °C, in its Browning mode; the Monsieur Cuisine stays at speed 3 when heating; the Companion changes accessory instead of running in reverse; the Cookeo pressure-cooks and leaves the chopping to the knife. Each robot has its own page, at zeste.cooking/robot-cuiseur.
On every recipe, a switch offers the robot version of the steps, next to the original recipe. Each step shows its settings: time, temperature, speed, reverse or Varoma on the Thermomix, accessory on the Companion, mode and pressure-cooking time on the Cookeo. The robot version is prepared the first time you open it, then kept with the recipe; if you edit the recipe or change robots, it's redone.
In cooking mode, the settings appear as chips on the step and the timer uses the robot's time. And if you double the servings to the point of overflowing the bowl, Zeste tells you how many batches to make.
As with anything the AI writes, a quick look before starting the robot never hurts. Robot mode is free.
Sign in with Facebook
After Google and Apple, Facebook joins the sign-in buttons, on the web and in the app. Zeste only receives your email address and your public profile, nothing from your feed or your friends.
Cookbooks, shopping and small things
A cookbook can be renamed and deleted, from the web as well as the app; deleting a cookbook doesn't delete its recipes. In the shopping list, "Clear all" starts you off with a clean list without checking off every item.
Meal reminders, the seasonal recipe and the year in review now follow your time zone. A scanned PDF with no text is read page by page, like a series of photos. Calories and macros can be corrected in the app. And the Profile is organized into sections, with your year in the kitchen set aside for December.
Still here: referrals
Your referral link is in the app, Share tab, then Friends, and in Settings on the web. When a friend signs up with it and confirms their email, you each get 5 free imports, counted separately in "Your imports this week".
Everything arrives through the app's automatic update, the next time you open it.