Best Device for Following Recipes

The device: For my maiden batch of madeleines, I chose the Amazon Echo Show 8.

The Show 8 hits the sweet spot in Amazon’s current line of Show devices with a decent-sized screen, a modest footprint, and a reasonably low price. Our testers report that the Show 8 doesn’t sound great—which is too bad since we all need music to bake with—but performs very well otherwise.

The bake: I started my culinary adventure by rewatching that Season 9 episode of the baking show for inspiration. And since the Echo interfaces neatly with Netflix, that was a piece of cake, so to speak. While the episodes don’t offer much in the way of how-to technique, the Show 8’s screen proved large enough to see what bakers Rahul, Ruby, Kim-Joy, and Briony were doing as they assembled their madeleines on deadline.

Then it came time to find an actual recipe, which proved to be a challenge for Alexa and a frustration for me. I asked Alexa for a recipe and I got three pretty generic choices which, upon closer inspection, didn’t have the detail I needed as a first-time madeleine baker.

When I tried to be more specific and asked for a recipe from my favorite cooking site, Serious Eats, I got random results, from a savory dish called Spinach Madeline to—believe it or not,—Vegetarian Pad Thai. The Echo’s voice command search couldn’t give me what I wanted, and the Show 8 tends to think of its hard-to-access virtual keyboard as an input of last resort. That made it hard to do anything but ask Alexa nicely. Again and again.

I ultimately “cheated” and asked for the exact title of the Serious Eats recipe word … for … word (having looked it up on my phone)—but the frustration continued. 

The Echo Show laid out the Serious Eats recipe in just three novella-length steps: Make the batter. Bake. Remove from the oven. When I asked Alexa how to beat eggs until they’re “light and thick,” the Show 8 popped up a random mayonnaise recipe. 

The only thing the Show 8 was really great at? Suggesting madeleine pans for me to buy on Amazon.

The result: Overall, I had a frustrating experience with an Alexa device that wasn’t particularly happy with either voice commands or touchscreen inputs. And I found a few stains on the Show 8’s cloth covering—disappointing in a hands-free device. On the bright side, my madeleines were surprisingly good for a first try, golden brown with a very nice signature hump on the top.

The device: For my second batch, I decided I needed a video-based recipe that wouldn’t just tell me but show me how to bake madeleines. Enter the Lenovo Yoga laptop. The Lenovo Yoga 9i 14 is a medium-sized, premium Windows laptop. Its touchscreen display is bright and sharp, and the built-in Bowers and Wilkens speaker delivered the best sound in my extended baking experiment, all the better for listening to Serge Gainsbourg as pastry mood music. Our lab testers give the Yoga high marks for versatility, and I chose it for its flexible geometry. It’s a 2-in-1 laptop, so the keyboard can be folded all the way back, tablet-style, or back just far enough to prop up the touchscreen.

The bake: Surfing YouTube between bakes, I discovered a kind of amazing 10-recipe madeleine video bake-off. And based on that inside info, I asked the voice control in Google Chrome to find a YouTube channel called Preppy Kitchen. Host John Kanell’s madeleine video gave me a) a pang of jealousy over his copper pots, and b) a demonstration of two of the more advanced steps in making madeleines: browning the butter (until it was, surprisingly, as dark as mahogany) and mixing the eggs and sugar (until they were pale and thick and ribbony).

I soon realized I’d be bouncing back and forth between the YouTube video, where I could see the techniques and the recipe that laid out the ingredients. I propped up the Lenovo like a pup tent, which minimized its substantial footprint, and I was disproportionately delighted when the display flopped to the proper orientation without additional input from me.

The size of the Lenovo’s screen was also a bonus because I could perch the laptop on the far end of the counter and still see the details of John Kanell’s demos. If I wanted to move the laptop closer, I could have opened two Windows and kept the recipe and video side-by-side. While the Google Assistant voice control was better than Alexa, I still found myself toggling between windows with floury fingers on what turned out to be a reassuringly mess-resistant touchscreen. 

The result: The Yoga took up a bit more space on my counter than the Show 8, but typing on an actual keyboard made videos easier to access and its huge touchscreen made them easier to watch. And, of course, I was able to reclaim some valuable counter space by stowing the Yoga away when I was done. By the way, this laptop is a pricey, high-end model, but there are plenty of 2-in-1 laptops with Yoga-like designs that cost much less and should perform similarly.

As for the madeleines, the brown butter suggested by Preppy Kitchen and a splash of bourbon (my innovation) definitely kicked up the flavor a notch.

The device: For my troisième batch, I dredged up a plain old text-based recipe with the help of Apple’s latest smartphone. When it comes to kitchen duty, the Apple iPhone 14 doesn’t offer much in the way of special functionality—unless you want to take photos of your food with its souped-up camera. The 14 is pretty much a medium-sized smartphone, and all things considered, it felt like a shiny new version of the smartphone that most of us carry around in our pocket or purse.

The bake: By this point, my counter was beginning to get a bit crowded with sacks of flour and sugar and a variety of tools ranging from a rarely used sifter to my trusty white KitchenAid mixer. My previously organized mise en place looked more like the aftermath of a home invasion. So the prospect of using a compact, almost tiny, device was very attractive. 

But employing Apple’s digital assistant Siri in the kitchen was a bit of a mixed bag.

When I tried to search for a traditional recipe I’d read about, at first Siri found me “madeleines to come and see” instead of “madeleines de Commercy.” But on the second try with Siri, I found the old-school recipe I craved.

The layout of the Leonce Chenal site was elegant, and the text was just big enough that I could read the steps with the phone on the counter (though I did need to touch the screen to scroll down—Siri couldn’t help with that). And all of its measurements were metric.

I started by converting the sugar from grams to ounces using an iPhone app called Converter, which required more screen tapping. Then I gave up and got out my gram scale for the flour and baking powder. This was a smart move, but it also pushed my chaotic countertop further into overload. So I stashed the phone in my hoodie pocket for safekeeping until I could load the dishwasher.

Despite the website’s ode-to-Hermès graphics, this recipe was actually super-easy; no need to brown the butter, beat the sugar, or even butter the madeleine pans. I just dumped everything together, including so much baking powder I thought it was a typo, chilled the batter, and baked. Who needs fancy?

The result: Siri was okay as a digital assistant, though I needed to handle the iPhone 14’s screen more than I liked. And while this was a text-based recipe, I also checked out a few technique videos—and perusing those in any detail required me to pick up the iPhone and hold it in front of my face. Those madeleines de Commercy, however, were a revelation: tasty and delicate, though the “hump” was a tad misshapen on a few.

The device: For my last batch, I thought I’d find a way to make my madeleines look as good as they tasted with assistance from a Samsung tablet. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is an Android tablet with a 10.4-inch touchscreen. Our testers gave it generally strong marks but found the screen to be a bit dim compared with some other models. That wasn’t an issue in my kitchen, though.

The bake: Having pulled off both Preppy Kitchen’s high-church madeleines recipe and the quick-and-dirty version at Leonce Chenal, it was now all about style points. So I came full circle to a YouTube video in which “Great British Baking Show” alum Kim-Joy Hewlett makes “pandaleines,” aka madeleines decorated to look like little pandas, the kind of move that helped earn her a place in the finals. 

Following Kim-Joy’s advice to save time by freezing the batter before baking, I was impressed by the Samsung’s screen-to-overall-device ratio. It’s all screen. I came to think that the tablet might represent the perfect size for a digital kitchen helper. I was a little less impressed with Kim-Joy’s TV baking secret. While I’m sure a trip to the icebox was necessary to meet television deadlines, my frozen batter had the consistency of spackle, and I briefly considered using a trowel to get it into the pans.

But when I moved to Kim-Joy’s second video, in which she puts little faces on the madeleines, the Samsung began to annoy me a little, too. Where should I put the darned thing? The tablet was too big to hold in one hand, but when I tried to prop it up on my granite countertops, it kept sliding around. I finally ended up using a heavy fruit bowl and not one, but two grapefruits to support the Galaxy Tab S6. The long-term solution, of course, would be to get a cheap stand or Samsung’s Book Cover case to prop up the tablet.

And I’ll blame that distraction for the enormous difficulty I had in keeping the black-and-white icing on the panda’s faces (like Kim-Joy’s) and not oozing into an amorphous gray blob (like mine.)

The result: The Samsung tablet was a kind of Goldilocks device: not too big, not too small. And I imagine that a similarly sized iPad—with a stand to prop it up—would work just as well if you’re an Apple fan. My fancy madeleines, however, fared less well. Despite Kim-Joy’s coaching, my little decorated cakes looked less like a friendly panda and more like a mangy raccoon. I guess I’ll take my madeleines straight up, thank you.

Having baked 5,376 calories worth of scrumptious little French cakes purely in the interest of science, I have reached some conclusions. 

Do I think you should give up precious real estate on your kitchen counter to a smart screen? In a word, no. While the Echo Show 8 was decent enough at popping up a random recipe, most cooks, I think, will want more. 

Alexa reminded me a little of my dog Rugby (without the personality.) She could perform the simplest task (fetch a recipe) but ask for anything more complicated (fetch exactly this recipe from that website) and, despite her eagerness to please, she just ended up chasing her tail.

The other devices also used digital assistants, but, crucially, they weren’t dependent on them. Yes, that meant that every now and then I needed to touch a clean screen with a sticky finger, but thanks to the wonders of modern water-resistant electronics, I could just grab a dish towel and pretend it never happened.

The good news is that most of us already have a phone, tablet, or laptop, so it’s easy enough to level up your cooking skills by bringing your tech into the kitchen. Just think of these devices as cookbooks on steroids.

The Yoga performed best out of the box—flipping the screen around was just flat-out fun—but I’m not sure I’d employ my own laptop while I was cooking, even if I had the extended warranty. And while I’ve certainly used my own iPhone to find and follow a recipe, I found the screen just a little too small for easy reading.

Which leaves the tablet. The Samsung checks most of the boxes. It’s modestly priced. It’s water- and schmutz-resistant. And most important, its sharp, bright screen is big enough to watch videos comfortably but compact enough to be stashed away when the cooking is over.

My biggest praise? When I was done with the last batch of madeleines, instead of putting the tablet away immediately, I started searching for more recipes. Tarte Tatin anyone?