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Cataloging new creations and work in the kitchen is a great way of developing dishes, techniques and research. The question is, what’s the best way to catalogue new dishes? Is it a written recipe, a crude drawing like those of Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz at Mugaritz or plasticine recreations of dishes - the technique adopted by Ferran Adria at elBulli.
Most chefs opt for pictures, a quick snap of a new dish, but this quickly leads to thousands of random pics on the phone, each with different light and some that you can’t even remember cooking. It’s because of this need to catalogue and lack of an easy way of doing it that APIC have created the Apic Base - a simple device designed to help chefs photograph, store and share their best creations.
The Apic Base is a simple unit that’s been designed specifically to take pics of food. Powered by a 16mp camera and clever lighting unit, the device brings professional style pics to the kitchen at the touch of a button.
Users place the dish on the unit and alter a few settings using a built in touch pad. The real magic starts once the pic has been taken as the Apic Base automatically uploads the images to what the company call a “personal vault” - here the chef can tag their dishes with specific info on the ingredients used and even add a full recipe to the pic.
The Apic software also allows chefs to share the pics across their social networks and there's a system in place that allows a chef to make a recipe available online and receive a payment every time someone downloads it.
The base unit costs around $2153 including a one year subscription to the online vault and sharing service - users will have to renew their Apic online accounts annually at the price of $252.
A number of well known chefs are already using the device and you can actually see some of their best creations on the Apic website - take a look.
