Gilt Taste - An iPad App for Cooks - NYTimes.com SINCE tablet computers came on the market, there has been the kitchen equivalent of the space race: competition to develop technology that can keep a cook's sticky, floury hands off the touch-screen. With its new app, the e-commerce site Gilt Groupe appears to have combined appealing recipes with a touchless interface that really works. Gilt Taste, the company's food platform, is to release a free iPad-only app, also called Gilt Taste, on Wednesday. Its 140 recipes are presented straightforwardly - all text, one recipe step on each page, no videos - except for one game-changing feature. Using the iPad's built-in camera, which tracks your hand movements, you can turn the pages of the recipe without touching the tablet. Lift your hand in front of the screen, brush it from right to left (as if turning the page of a book), and the screen flips to the next step. Wave your hand from left to right, and it goes back to the last step. The ingredient list stays on the screen, tucked on the left, to remind you how many eggs to add or how many garlic cloves to mince. And once you have minced or mixed, without stopping to wash your hands, you can proceed with the next step of the recipe. Other recipe-app developers say that hands-free technology is important, but still in its infancy. "Turning pages is just a first step," said Bob Huntley, the software developer for culinary apps like Cooking Italian With Giuliano Hazan and Baking With Dorie. Once the camera gives you kinetic trackability, the tablet can learn, and that's where things get interesting. His vision for the future includes a wearable device, like a Bluetooth, that would allow cooks to interact with digital recipes. If you want to get real science fiction, think about this: it couldn't stir the risotto for you, but it could tell you if you weren't stirring it fast enough. Back in the real world, Gilt Taste's Touch-Free Recipe Mode technology prevents the device from blacking out in the middle of a complicated recipe step, as often happens with cooking apps. In fact, anyone can do this by turning the auto-lock setting on the device to Never. Gilt Taste is not the first hands-free recipe app. Last year, iCookbook was released by Publications International. A voice-recognition feature allows it to follow simple commands like "Next," "Back" and "Timer." The feature works well as long as the kitchen is quiet. The noise of onions sizzling or water running seems to confuse it. There's another catch with iCookbook: all of its 2,000 or so recipes are from manufacturers, so they make use of products that a cook might not otherwise choose, like two cups of French's French Fried Onions in beef soup, or cubed Spam and canned pizza sauce in an hors d'oeuvre. The recipes from Gilt Taste - as would be expected from a site curated by Ruth Reichl, a former restaurant critic for The New York Times and a former editor of Gourmet magazine - are generally made from fresh ingredients, are more modern and creative, and some call for the exotic products available on the site, like black garlic and whole rabbits ($59.95 for two). Cooks who use their tablets often, like the students at the Culinary Institute of America, have developed work-arounds to keep their devices pristine. The school's three-year cooking curriculum - long housed in a doorstop of a book titled "The Professional Chef" - was released as an app last year. Most students at the school slip their iPads into sealable plastic bags because the touch-screen responds to commands through the plastic - as long as the bag stays clean. A company called Chef Sleeve sells a disposable iPad cover that offers clearer plastic for better readability and a more snug fit. A tight coating of plastic wrap can also be used for this. But with all of these protectors, a dusting of flour or a smear of butter can make the recipe unreadable. Another iPad feature that some cooks have discovered: the magnetic Smart Cover that Apple makes is strong enough to stick the device securely to a refrigerator door, and puts the recipe at eye level. Recipe apps are developing all kinds of new tricks. The first cookbook of the chef Laurent Gras, "Laurent Gras: My Provence," is being published this week, as an app only, by Alta Editions, a digital company. It used a Web platform new to e-cookbooks, HTML5, that makes the app usable on desktop and laptop computers as well as on tablets. Trufflehead, a cooking app for young adults from the developer Mobile Skillet, lets users upload photographs of food directly to a Trufflehead Web site. Mark Douglas, a partner in Culinate, a Web site and software developer that produced the visually irresistible "Hello, Cupcake!" app, said tablet technology was changing so quickly that the only market strategy is to focus on content. The device itself is only two years old, he pointed out, but many new apps already cannot function on 2010 iPads. "It's great fun trying to guess what is a good feature now, and what Apple or Samsung will decide is a good feature a year from now," he said.