Genius Kitchen App Brings Nigella Lawson and Original Iron Chef Episodes to Your Phone

There is now yet another streaming app, but this one is all about food. Launched today, the Genius Kitchen app is part of a new digital food brand from Food Network and Cooking Channel parent company Scripps will feature both new shows and existing favorites, including English star Nigella Lawson's series Simply Nigella, which it brings to the U.S. for the first time.

The Genius Kitchen iOS app is free, at least so far, and is aimed at millennials, who Scripps is betting want their food shows on the go. The original shows include GK Now, a weekly program on pop culture and "crazy food trends" hosted by YouTube personalities Akilah Hughes and Mike Lockyer; Feast With Friends, where Australian chef Dan Churchill focuses on the social side of cooking; Carnivorous with comedian Courtney Rada, which seems to center around rare or strange meats; and several more instructional programs.

With so many streaming services already including some cooking shows in their library, Genius Kitchen hopes to set itself apart not just with original programming, but with an interactive recipe feature that lets you download recipes from what you're watching to your mobile device. More importantly, though, its archive of existing shows includes old episodes of the original Iron Chef from Japan, which, one could argue, is in many ways better than any other television show ever.

Hopefully, Genius Kitchen remains free, as the recent splintering of streaming services into more and more smaller ones seems like its inevitably heading back towards the days of paying for a ton of different channels that, for a few years, Netflix was helping viewers leave behind. It does intend to have a "lighter commercial load than typical TV channels," so that's a start, though the real test is whether or not that reduced time watching commercials will give you enough time to fit in an extra episode of Iron Chef.