Recipe Aggregators
I love to cook but I don't have many recipes memorized, and much as I like cooking from any of the several cookbooks in my library, I often look for new recipes online. It's not an easy task. I'm amazed at the number of ad-riddled pages I find when typing the name of any dish into Google. I do have an online subscription to Cook's Illustrated (previously reviewed), and there are a handful of other individual free sites I turn to for recipes and technique info. However, as a research librarian, I'm always keen to execute a search in a manner that maximizes the number of relevant results by querying a specific set of targeted resources. For scientific queries, I use freely accessible databases such as Public Library of Science or PubMed, or I use one of my library accounts to access subscription-based databases such as Wiley InterScience or Elsevier's Science Direct. When I put my home-cook hat on, I approach recipe-finding with a similar set of expectations. Though there's no shortage of recipe information online, there's not really an equivalent set of databases for cookery. Here's a round-up of the best recipe aggregation resources I've found.
Epicurious is my go-to recipe site; I've used it for four years. One of the aspects I like most about it is the user comments. Because the site is older, most recipes have at least a handful of comments, and I've found that most users leave really helpful feedback (usually suggestions for how to scale or tweak recipes). However, it's also very easy to ignore user comments if you just want to stick to the original recipe. I usually cook from printed versions of the recipes (rather than bringing my laptop in the kitchen), and Epicurious offers several options for the size of the printed page, whether or not images are included, and even the option to print a separate shopping list.
Most recipes come from Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines (the site is owned by Conde Nast). Some come from cookbooks published by Random House, with whom Epicurious has some kind of republication agreement, it seems. Some have also been reprinted from other cookbooks, with permission. In addition to the 25,000 recipes from these professional resources, they also boast 50,000 member-submitted recipes. Epicurious is the online food site to beat.
Cookstr publishes recipes by professional chefs, including Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver, Alice Waters, Jacques Pepin, Michael Recchiuti, Mark Bittman, and on and on. In addition to recipes, the site also provides informative profiles for each chef. Features are fairly minimal, with a video section still under development, but I do like the simplicity of the site. Site registration allows you to save and comment on recipes. Although Cookstr only has a few recipes from each chef, it's the closest thing to a massively cross-cook[book] database I've found. I hope it grows.
I learned about Food52 when the New York Times ran a round-up of new, crowd-sourced food sites. The hook of this site, founded by two food writers, is that every week there's a theme-based competition; after a year of these contests, the winning recipes will be collected in a book. Any registered user can compete in the competitions, the founders select finalists and post slideshows of them testing the recipes, and then users vote for a winner. The focus of the site is the contests, and all recipes submitted for the contests are accessible, but registered users can upload any type of recipe. Although there is a pretty sizable diversity of recipes on the site, I most often use it when I'm looking for inspiration to try something new, not when I have a few keystone ingredients I'm trying to hang together.
Serious Eats is another curated food community with some social features, including a set of forums, and original video content in addition to a large collection of recipes. Recipes come largely from featured cookbook writers and chefs, but also the wider community base (in the forums). It's more inclusive than Food52, because of its forums, and it's more polyphonous because its cast of contributors is quite long and revolving. However, it's less inclusive in the sense that the Recipes section of the site is limited to those curated by contributors (mostly recipes from featured books and chefs).
Foodbuzz is a network of foodbloggers (more than 10,000). They offer a set of services for "featured publishers," including ad management and other perks, as well as several social networking-type features for individual users. Foodbuzz is one of the few sites I've found that actually aggregates recipes from across the web. You can submit links to recipes to be indexed, and you can also submit recipes for direct publication at the site. It displays some characteristics of a curated site in as much as it highlights recipes from members of its featured publishers network, but overall it's quite open since anyone can submit a recipe or recipe link.
Epicurious, Cookstr, Food52, SeriousEats, and Foodbuzz are my favorite recipe aggregators. To reduce my search load even further, I've created a custom Google search engine that queries these sites in addition to a few of my favorite individual sources (you can see it here).
Favorite (15)
noirkat
If you like visuals with your recipes, TasteSpotting.com is a great site. It has a roundup of food bloggers' posts, all of which have pictures to go with their recipes. It is a beautiful site and a search turns up lovely pictures to browse through. Click on any picture to go to the linked blog post. One of my favourite sites.
foodie
Another great site for recipes, www.weeatt.com.
cgorange
Wow! Couldn't disagree with you more on Epicurious. Violates so many tennants of good web design -- aweful slideshows, far too many pop-ups, difficult to locate information. It's for people who hate websites, magazine publishers, people who like pictures (but not recipes), and people who like annoying whack-a-mole style pop-up ads.
Epicurious blows.
Stuart
Check out Supercook - it is a recipe search engine that scours other sites (including some of the ones you mention). It has a great interface that is centered on ingredients.
Ryan
Does anyone know of a good web tool/program for collecting recipes.? Looking for one that I can easily enter in my handwritten onces, collect online ones and keep them in one spot....
Mike
Ryan: I just copy and paste the recipe into Google Docs. Not really searchable or scalable but it's working for me so far.
Amy
I like Allrecipes.com. Includes ratings of recipes, comments on how people have tweaked them, and the ability to scale recipes up and down. You can save recipes in your online "recipe box", which is helpful if you want to find a recipe you cooked last year. Also, if you want to go offline you can print the recipe out in different formats, with or without estimated nutritional information. They are unfortunately starting to have a subscription-only selection of "premium" recipes, but I still like Allrecipes for ingredients searches and the wide variety of user-submitted recipes.
KimJSCP
Ryan - check out evernote.com. It is nothing short of amazing. Too much to explain here, but check out there blog and podcast to get a hint of Evernote's amazing power.
But as far as something dedicated to just recipes, check out tastebook.com.
It not only allows you to easily enter your own recipes (including photos) into online books you set up, but it connects with LOTS of online recipe sites like Epicurious and lets you import their recipes into your book with just a click or two. Even better, is that you can buy a hard copy of your own recipe book.
Kaitlin
I will second Amy's comments about allrecipes.com-- I've been using it since 2001 and have found the user reviews and comments to be extremely useful in choosing a recipe to make.
Jeff Janer
Ryan et al: check out http://springpadit.com/food for a free service that not only lets you collect, personalize and share recipes from any site on the web - but also automatically create shopping lists accessible from any mobile. There are also free apps to use your recipes, including the recipe box (http://sprng.me/3qie), a weekly meal planner (http://sprng.me/12n) and a wine notebook (http://sprng.me/46q)
(full disclosure - I'm a Springpad co-founder)
Josh Grossman
There are some great recipe sites out there. The problem is what do you do when you find recipes on 10 different sites that you want to save. You need to create accounts on all of them, and then how do you remember which site had which recipe?
Springpad, which is an online personal organizer, has a simple way to store all your favorite recipes. Just copy and paste the URL of the recipes you love and they are then all stored in your personal Springpad to make it easy to find them later, or even pull up at the supermarket on your phone. (full disclosure - I work for Springpad). Check out the free recipe box here:
http://springpadit.com/appdirectory/aboutapp/recipebox
Owen
This is a very interesting topic for us foodies - the underlying platforms keep shifting and sites are doing more and more to make it harder and harder to get a good range of results when you search.
In particular I had a very hard time doing recipe searches based on ingredients in anything like a standardized manner, so I built my own - it is running on my food blog (which has been operating for over five years now - where does the time go) but which I don't contribute to so very much anymore. The way it works is that I put together some pretty sophisticated searches that deliver results in the form of RSS feeds (reverse engineering some of the searches in some cases) and then use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate them and do its best to remove duplicates and then deliver the results altogether on a web page. Anyone can use it - it is in the right hand sidebar of tomatilla.com and you just enter up to three ingredients in the input boxes and set it off. You can actually put in other things like a technique or a cooking implement or a recipe name as if it were an ingredient as well and it will still work. The search runs across several aggregators and yahoo and google as well so results come form hundreds of sites. So if that sounds worthwhile give it a try.
Anne
I'm a big fan of Allrecipes.com too! They seem to have a recipe for just about anything. I love that you can see what other people have in their Recipe Boxes. Way cool for getting ideas.
ProfWombatq
Epicurious has an app for the iPhone that I've found really helpful...
Dakota Phoenix
No one seems to have mentioned sites for vegetarian or vegan cooking. vegweb.com is my #1 source for vegan recipes these days, and the comments section really helps with adjusting amounts/spices/techniques. We vegans may only be 2% of the population but we're loyal to those sources that accomodate us. Thanks.
Rich
Try food.com... it aggregates recipes from all the food sites, and lets you build your own recipe collections etc. Good stuff.
scott
I'd really like to start using Delicious.com as a more effective way to organize interesting recipes. Most of my ideas come from food blogs which I subscribe to via RSS. I'll usually "star" good ones on google reader. I'm thinking about tagging them in delicious and using good tags based on ingredients, type of dish, etc. Because I'm vegan, i don't really think I can rely on more mainstream recipe websites and this allows me to bring in recipes (aka blog posts) into one place and theoretically bring the comments with it (because it is essentially being saved as a link).
Amanda
Check out mealopedia.com, all the recipes I've tried have been great, and it has plenty of vegetarian options.
PeterB
Try Recipe8.com :: I would like to suggest a (Recipe Aggregator) Aggregator. I too was frustrated by what google returns when you search for recipes. I like many of the sites you mention. @noirkat TasteSpotting is beautiful. I created a google custom search that is quite comprehensive while avoiding the duplication and false results that made searching so difficult. You get all the power of google but limited to just recipes. Even the About pages from great sites like AllRecipes are excluded. Give it a try. Try searching for something like "pumpkin pie" on Recipe8.com. The first 10 recipes are from 9 separate sites. @Amands, @Dakota, Two out of the first 20 recipes are vegan. If you want to make sure you only get vegan recipes, then (this is google) just add "vegan" to the search. If you want to avoid vegan, then add "-vegan" to the search.
CI_Staff
Been reading the site for a while now and finally have something (mostly) useful to offer, at least it's on topic. I actually work for Cook's Illustrated and we just this week released a new search engine to try to make our readers experience better and faster. While we are definitely not an aggregator site I thought many here who are familiar with the brand might appreciate knowing we recognized the um...short comings of our old search and started from the ground up! We put a lot of time and effort into our recipes and believe they deserved a better way to be found!
Laral
Boy CI_Staff, the Cook's Illustrated site is in need of much more than a new search engine. What good is a new search engine if nearly all the recipes are inaccessible to the public? Requiring a PAID subscription to view online recipes from the magazine and the shows, which PBS members are already paying for, is absolutely Byzantine. Virtually any other magazine or PBS show allows free access to any content that has already been published or aired. What you need is a completely new business model. See KK's excellent article about New Rules for the New Economy:
http://www.kk.org/newrules/blog/follow-the-free/
Jo P
I was going to mention Springpad ( http://springpadit.com/food )
but Josh already did! I find it immensely useful -- love that I can drag recipe URLs into the recipe box, then generate a shopping list!
AWESOME!
thanks
Jo :-)
Michlerish
I dislike epicurious. I use www.allrecipes.com all the time! Tastespotting.com is also great for ideas from the blog world.
MichelleW
Here's a site I've been using to find and store recipes. It's saves me a lot of time because I can often find a similar recipe and create a variation-- saves typing.
http://www.tablespoon.com/
Lspicola
Foodieview has a super search engine : http://www.foodieview.com
Alex
Just tried Springpad. What a great idea! I'm going to migrate all my online recipes over and have them in one place. Much less skitzy! Thanks!
I also keep a large collection of recipes just on my computer hard drive. So, I'll add a few suggestions for anyone who may not quite yet trust "the cloud":-). These programs are for Apple Macintosh OS only. (Sorry, I've no suggestions for those captive in the Borg Empire. All I can offer is: To the lifeboats, quick!).
• If you're using Mac OS 10.4, there's 'Yojimbo' from Bare Bones Software. There is also a new version for Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6. Yojimbo stores just about anything in its database. It will turn any webpage into a PDF, or web archive, store text, images, etc.. Or you can selectively just just cut and paste into a note. Within Yojimbo you can store in folders and also add tags. Very straight forward, clean interface.
• "Together" is my new fave. It works only on Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6. Very handsome and intuitive interface. Again you can store just about anything in just about any format. It has the added plus that it does not store items in a database, but rather as easily accessible documents in the folder/s of your choice -- thus it is infinitely expandable.
You can also scan anything into either of these programs as PDF, text, image. Handy if you have a physical paper clipping you don't want to misplace.
Hope this is useful.
charlotte
I love cooking but really need to continue to work on my basic skills and technique. I have found startcooking.com to be a great resource. I love the videos and find them to be helpful.