A brand new recipe business has married the best ingredients of traditional recipe books with smart phone technology to produce a service that is causing a stir in the kitchen.
ICSA is delighted to announce our partnership with ckbk.
ckbk a digital recipe subscription service transforming the way chefs, culinary students and keen home cooks find inspiration and hone their skills. A Premium subscription to ckbk offers unlimited access to an ever expanding collection of over 350 trusted cookbooks by award-winning food writers and master chefs.
Instantly search and explore classic cookbooks penned by culinary greats including Victorian England’s original domestic goddess, Mrs Beeton, the undisputed doyenne of Italian cooking, Marcella Hazan and Chinese cooking expert, Ken Hom. Discover new flavours from over 100 national cuisines from the street foods of Burma to traditional Georgian country cooking. Improve your technique with ckbk’s curated selection of educational titles, such as The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Frieberg. And while you’re at it, cook your way to Michelin star greatness with guidance from Alain Ducasse and Paul Bocuse.
Whether you have an appetite for the perfect paella, artisan sourdough, healthy options, free from recipes, or you have your heart set on a dish by a favourite chef, aided by ckbk’s sophisticated smart filtering, you’ll instantly find your ideal recipe among the tens of thousands at your fingertips. Other great features include the ability to ‘favourite’ recipes and create personal collections of recipes, authors or cookbooks and share them with other ckbk members or keep private.
Launched in spring 2019, ckbk has since been called ‘Spotify for cookbooks’. The platform’s London-based founder Matt Cockerill embraces the analogy.
“The internet is overflowing with free recipes, but the material is sometimes chaotic and unreliable. Cookbooks offer trusted, authoritative recipes and a whole lot more – but until now they have been stuck on the shelf, increasingly neglected because of the undeniable convenience of the internet search. With ckbk we offer the best of both worlds. For a monthly fee, users get unlimited digital access to the full content of an ever-expanding collection of cookbooks, and can even share ‘playlists’ of their favourite recipes.”
When creating the ckbk service, Cockerill and his co-founders Nadia Arumugam, an award-winning food journalist and cookbook author herself, and Jon Croft – a cookery publisher whose bestselling authors have included Keith Floyd and Tom Kerridge – recognised that there were pivotal authors who should be at the heart of the service. As a starting point, they quizzed hundreds of chefs and authors, including Nigella Lawson and Yotam Ottolenghi about their favourite cookbooks. The ‘top 1000 cookbooks’ identified by this process then guided the selection of books for inclusion in ckbk. Entirely unprecedented in the breadth and diversity of its offering, ckbk provides instant access to the legendary bibles of Escoffier, On Food and Cooking and the Oxford Companion to Food. These can be explored via the same modern and seamless interface as classics from Paula Wolfert, Yan Kit-So and Alan Davidson as well as contemporary cookbooks from famous names including David Tanis, Naomi Duguid, Francisco Migoya and Peter Gordon.
Offering all the expertise of a truly expansive culinary library at your fingertips, ckbk is the ultimate kitchen tool for all cooks.
Operations Director of ICSA James day added “Our ICSA cookery school diploma students are often tasked to research classic recipes as part of their curriculum, alongside our lifestyle course attendees, who wish to apply their newly acquired cookery course skills, and experiment with more challenging recipes. Our partnership with ckbk is the perfect ingredient to add to an accredited cookery course, to help apply the new skills, whilst have great fun to add to the overall value of the course and on-going experiences.”
ICSA students can benefit from 2 months FREE trial. Simply register for our #GourmetClub for details below:
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