America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking (DS) review "Peak DS shovelware for your face that doesn't leave a bad taste"

The Nintendo DS sits at a monumental transition in how people interact with software: when smart phones went from niche to popular. In 2008, the iPhone provided a non-technical user with a web browser that was not only easy to use but a mobile experience that was actually enjoyable. The release of the iOS SDK and subsequent App Store for third-party software created a new market for mobile software.

Nearly four years early, the Nintendo DS was attempting its own revolution. It’s easy to look back on the DS--the second best selling handheld in history--and forget just how bold the thing was. Nintendo was languishing in the face of stiff competition and Sony, the rival that devoured the console market from Nintendo’s plate, had announced that it was releasing its own handheld system. Nintendo’s then-president Yamauchi famously said that with the DS Nintendo would either “rise to heaven” or “sink to hell.” At the time, Nintendo's gambit was truly bold.

Touch screens and mobile software are normal now, but in 2004 the only other game console with touch input was Tiger’s disastrous Game.com. This was not yet proven technology and far from the de facto input standard on mobile devices that it is today. Nintendo really was taking a massive gamble and helping to create a market (for casual games) that developers did not yet know existed.

We know how this story ends, but it cannot be overstated how radical the DS was. The DS proved very popular with people never thought to be traditional gamers thanks in large part to its intuitive input scheme. It was a system that could be owned by a college kid or your grandmother. Several years before the iPhone and the App Store, there wasn’t “an app for that,” but there might have been a DS game.

Shaberu! DS Oryōri Navi (trans: It Talks! DS Cooking Navigator) is one of those DS games that filled a software niche that today would probably be a mobile app. It is essentially an interactive cookbook with narration, voice controls, and meal planning tools. It spawned five sequels, including Cooking Guide: Can’t Decide What to Eat (released as Personal Trainer: Cooking in North America). America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking is a North America exclusive sequel, developed by Nintendo.

On the surface, Let’s Get Cooking looks like what we would pejoratively call shovelware. It has a licensed name, it’s a sequel using essentially the same game engine as its predecessor, and it’s decidedly not a game. New copies are $6 on Amazon but if you buy them in bulk it might be cheaper than blank DS cases. This is the Nintendo DS in its majesty.

If you dig a bit deeper, there's more here. America’s Test Kitchen is a PBS cooking program and is actually a fairly well respected brand among home cooks. Their recipes are rigorously tested by both professional cooks and subscribers and they only publish recipes that are proven to deliver repeatable expected results. In a world where cooking blogs vomit long stories before showing some plagiarized recipe, ATK recipes provide explanations of why specific ingredients are used, instructions on making substitutions, and guidance on the specific techniques called for in the recipe.

It was actually an ATK magazine made me fall in love with cooking several years ago. I purchased an issue on impulse at the grocery store and it opened me up to a massive and wonderful world of vegetarian cuisine. I have a few ATK books now as well as a subscription to their mobile app.

Let’s Get Cooking was not developed by ATK itself, but rather by Nintendo. It’s the same software that powered Personal Trainer: Cooking, but with 300 recipes licensed from ATK.

Starting out, you’ll get a brief tutorial on how to use the app and create a profile. The menus are intuitive and surprisingly easy to navigate. The light elevator music, clear voice narration, and crisp sound effects make this software enjoyable and more game-like than Android cooking apps that I’ve used.

I found the recipe list a bit unwieldy at first, but there are a few ways to find recipes. For example, you can search by up to three ingredients, which is nice for “what should I do with this fennel bulb I bought on impulse at the farmers market” (that’s a thing other people do, right?). You can exclude ingredients, but that just causes them to show up in search results with a red icon next to them. I would have preferred to be able to fully hide excluded ingredients, but on the other hand that would hide recipes that could be made vegetarian by swapping meat stock with vegetable broth.

While there are a few ways to find recipes, recipes with excluded ingredients are still displayed. How am I supposed to ride around on my vegetarian high horse with all this meat everywhere?

The recipe interface is the highlight here. Each recipe is clearly divided into ingredients and steps, which can be viewed before starting. Many steps hide greater detail, which can be glossed over or opened as needed. You’ll also get a list of tools the recipes needs, though I didn’t find any recipes that required something out-of-the-ordinary. Individual ingredients also have a picture and description, which is helpful on the occasion that you aren’t sure what an ingredient is, as well as details on the preparation method used.

Once you are ready to start cooking, you can set the DS down. A voice will read the steps to you and then wait for your command. A microphone icon appears on the screen, and if you say any words on the screen that are in quotation marks (like “Continue!”) it will activate that button, letting you navigate the recipe without touching the DS with food-ladened hands. In my experience, the voice commands needed to be used in a quiet room and I needed to shout the word for it to be understood, and even then it only worked about half the time. I typically cook mise en place, so most of the work is done during prep time. The software does read out prep steps like the cooking instructions, but I didn’t find this really helpful. I prefer to just get all the ingredients out and prep everything at once. I don’t really need to fiddle with instructions for that.


Most of the recipes provided are quite simple and work well for this format. Even traditionally more involved dishes like risotto use a more hands-off method to avoid asking you to cook things in parallel with separate timings. Again, this didn’t really fit my style as I like to plan ahead and prep a different part of the recipes while something else is cooking. It seems like this was a product designed to cook with kids rather than to be used as a general purpose cooking tool. You can set up individual profiles, and when you start a recipe you can assign different tasks to different cooks. It appears that you can connect multiple DSs so that everyone has their own screen to use and work independently (I presume through download play), but I don’t have a second DS to try this out. It's still a neat touch and I haven't seen a modern cooking app provide a "multi-cook" feature like this.

The recipe interface works very well. You can have different profiles set up and assign different steps to different people.

While it’s no fault of the software, I found my DSi’s screen a bit too uncomfortable to read at a distance in the kitchen. A DSi XL or a 2/3DS XL would probably mitigate that issue. The steps appear on the top screen, so you can bend it a bit so that it is visible while the DS is sitting on the counter, which is helpful, but I did not like having single steps visible at a time. I’m a fairly experienced home cook at this point, and like to review the recipe and check upcoming steps so that I can plan accordingly instead of being surprised. While it was fun to use, it didn’t really enhance the cooking experience for me.

I don’t think I’m the target audience for this software though. The cover depicts a white mother and daughter cooking together in a nice, brightly lit, clean kitchen, with the DS sitting on the counter. My kitchen is a train weckage. The 7 year old steals ingredients; the 15 month old comes in and screams while trying to climb my legs. Every drawer has a child lock on it, and even after breaking through them, I still find the bowl I was looking for is dirty. I don’t have the time to futz around with the DS while cooking when life is already a distraction.

I attempted using this app with my 7 year old, but she seemed to find the novelty of having a talking game system in the kitchen distracting. She was more concerned with controlling “the cooking game” and what it was doing than actually cooking. She does better using a kid-level cookbook (of which, ATK has several) instead.

Besides cooking, this app also helps with meal planning. You can mark recipes as “try it”, and even schedule it for specific days with specific cooks. If you don’t have all the ingredients, you can add it to a digit grocery list and take the DS to the store with you. This feature works great, except that it’s 2021 and I’m already carrying a smart phone around with this capability.

There are other reference features as well, including a dozen or so instructional videos on basic kitchen and knife skills. These are concise, clear, and well made, but are at a beginner’s level. They would be useful for children and even adults with less experience, but you aren’t going to find pearls of little-known wisdom or anything like that.

Compared to other cooking software--including ATK’s official Android app--Let’s Get Cooking still feels impressive. The presentation, digital narration, and hands-free navigation are features the ATK Android app does not do, despite having more than a decade of technology advances. And because Let’s Get Cooking doesn’t need to fetch data from an online service like most cooking apps, it is quick and doesn’t suffer from load times. Having two screens also allows Let’s Get Cooking to display twice the information at once as modern cooking apps. Overall, it’s probably the best cooking software I’ve used, albeit with a now-dated and limited recipe library.

If you don’t cook much and like the idea of having a digital tutorial, Let’s Get Cooking is actually a great option. I’d recommend it over reading random cooking blogs, but personally I would still prefer to just use a cookbook. The recipes here still have ATK’s high quality of being well organized, easy to follow, and difficult to mess up. And they usually taste good. I did end up copying a few recipes by hand onto paper so I could make them later (without the DS in the kitchen)

Regardless of my personal preferences, Let’s Get Cooking is a well-made piece of software and provides a level of hand-holding and guidance that modern mobile cooking apps still do not rival. It’s also a great example of the DS-era boom that happened before smartphones took over our lives. The only thing this shovelware is guilty of is shoveling food in your face hole.

Community review by dagoss (May 02, 2021) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.