Recipe Sites that Taste 2.0: CookThink.com

Continuing on with my quest to find the best, 2.0-esque recipe site, I’ll review CookThink.com. Last week I took a look at GroupRecipes.com, which fared relatively well on the 4 criterium: Food Porn, Inventory, Inspiration, and Ease-of-Use. CookThink is actually the site which inspired this series of posts, as I was passed on a review from TechCrunch a little while back. Let’s see how well CookThink does, shall we?

Upon first visiting CookThink I must admit, I was quite confused. I tried putting in a few search terms and received no results, then clicked around to receive results that I hadn’t asked for. The site is based mainly on tags and the initial welcome screen is a clean, Google-esque search form. It seems to be less community based than GroupRecipes. Community is not a major component of a great recipe site in my opinon, but it’s a nice addition. Let’s see how it does on the 4 points:

Food Porn- 6
There are some small photos associated with many dishes, but nothing particularly exciting.

Inventory- ?
If I were able to actually find related recipes, I could tell you but after unsuccessfully searching fava bean, porcini, and ceviche I’ve come up empty handed.

Inspiration- 5
The site is well designed but nothing sexy is taking place. I feel like I’m doing work here trying to find a recipe and am certainly not inspired.

Ease-of-Use- 5
After visiting this site three times, I still don’t understand it. I put in “porcini mushroom” and I get a tag cloud of “related” words that seem completely unrelated. Why don’t I get recipes? This seems like an unnecessary added step. The tags that came up are: chicken, poblano, fish, greek yogurt. Huh?And if I click through, I see nothing about porcini in the recipes.

GroupRecipes is far better than CookThink. Does anybody feel otherwise? Stay tuned for my next post when I’ll review OpenSourceFood!

Recipe Sites that Taste 2.0: GroupRecipes.com

As mentioned in my first post, I’m on a hunt for the best “Web 2.0-esque” recipe site. I already know my favorite restaurant review site, Urbanspoon, but what kind of community site exists for finding unique, delicious recipes? As mentioned earlier, I came up with the top 4 ways I typically assess a recipe site: Food Porn, Inventory, Inspiration, and Ease-of-Use. Hopefully this covers the qualities you all might look for as well. So first up, GroupRecipes.com:

Food Porn rating: 7
A little lower on porn than some others but there is a tasteful, rotating image on the home page. The images are user-dependent so not every recipe has one, but the images that exist are high quality. People also can vote on pictures so that they appear more frequently.

Inventory rating: 8
Inventory here is relatively high as well. I used the terms: fava bean, porcini mushroom, and ceviche to test the level of recipe inventory, as explained in the initial post. GroupRecipes had 299 porcini mushroom recipes, 515 fava bean recipes, and 19 ceviche recipes. I would have given it a higher score but it has been around for a few years, so in some ways I’d expect more.

Inspiration rating: 9
When you first join you take their “taste test” where you rate your affinity for various foods so they can make recipe suggestions. I was happy to take the simple test to improve my experience, though it wasn’t mandatory. Furthermore, you can give a thumb’s up or down to various recipes so that the “Recipe Robot” continues to learn. As you browse the site anticipates how much you will like each recipe based on your taste. This is great for helping to dig through the piles of options.

Ease-of-Use: 9
The home page is clean and features a feed of recipes sorted by popularity or newness. I also liked how previous searches populate in the upper right hand corner of my window. The advanced search functionality is great. I can search by main ingredient, course, cuisine, or cook method.

Cool features: the recipe robot, a firefox plugin, send-to-phone, a comment wall for users a la Facebook

I am pretty impressed with GroupRecipes and can actually see myself becoming a consistent user. How about you? Poke around and let me know what you think!

Recipe Sites that Taste 2.0

I am a member of Facebook, Urbanspoon, Snooth, and a frequent Twitterer. I gobble up social media networks when they make my life simpler or more fun. For some reason however, I still use old-fashioned recipe hunting methods. I buy big, glossy books, flip through our magazine, and maybe use a conventional recipe site like Epicurious.com. My recipe seeking habits lag far behind my habits in other spheres. Why is this?

For some reason there has been a wild proliferation of community restaurant review sites, while recipe sites were slow to develop. Sure, major food publications have libraries of recipes but where is the recipe site of a different color? Where is the site with a made up word in its title? There are countless blogs and other tools, like I’ve discussed before, but Web 2.0 recipe sites seemed missing from the marketplace, at least to my knowledge. I was intrigued recently to discover a few that are set to be revolutionary, recipe- finding tools.

In perusing these, I realized that I look for 4 specific things in a recipe site:

1) Food Porn. Everybody likes a sexy shot of tuna tartare or a four-cheese pizza. A great recipe site makes your mouth water and keeps you engaged with visual content. It’s no fun to surf a site that reads like a software installment guide.
2) Inventory. If I search for fava beans, there better be recipes for fava bean puree, roasted fava beans, fava bean pizza, etc. All different cooking techniques and skill levels should be represented as well. To test inventory I’ve chosen three random search terms: fava bean, porcini mushroom, and ceviche.
3) Inspiration. A great food site brings the recipes to you. One should go to the home page and feel nearly overwhelmed by suggestions, ideas, and options that entice.
4) Ease of use. As applied to any great website, nobody should have to think too hard to learn a new recipe site. Browsing for recipes should be relaxing and fun, not stressful.

A successful Web 2.0 recipe site should build on the original 4, while incorporating the great things we love about Web 2.0 like usability and community. Over the upcoming weeks I will introduce and rate a few of these. The first three will be GroupRecipes, CookThink, and OpenSourceFood. If you’ve come across others, suggest them here for inclusion in the series. Stay tuned!

4 Foodie Sites You Probably Aren’t Reading But Should Be

So you currently frequent the big guns like Chowhound, Eater, Epicurious and the like. But you’re craving something new. Here are 4 sites I’ve been perusing recently that are great resources for restaurant ideas, recipes, and discounts. They’re certainly worth a visit.

#4 Urbanspoon.com is the first site I’ve noticed that aggregates restaurant reviews of users and experts, and does a damn good job of it. Many sites out there try to achieve this goal, but they simply don’t have the volume that I find on Urbanspoon. Look up any restaurant in a major city in the U.S. and you can cross-reference the NY Times review to Joe Blo’s review to StrumErika.com’s review. Finally experts, bloggers and average diners can live in the same sphere. You choose who you want to listen to. They even pull in menus from menupages.com, when available. I may be getting too salesy here, but this site is honestly my jump-off point when I’m trying to pick a restaurant these days. It can be hard to keep track of places I’ve been or plan to go to and the site also has many tools to help you organize and remember restaurants you’ve visited by, adding them to Wishlists, Favorites and the like. The site is also very intuitive and clean, a no-brainer characteristic that any successful site should have but many neglect. I encourage you all to check out what’s being served on Urbanspoon.

#3 Writingwithmymouthfull.com. At the risk of driving away my readership, I’d like to promote some of the beautiful writing and food photography on this blog. I stumbled across it recently and I truly enjoyed the author, cia_b’s material. Her food photos are simply gorgeous and her recipes are experimental and eclectic. She even has a blood and offal category ;) I enjoy her philosophy, as illustrated in the About section: Food tells us about our relationships with the earth and our surroundings. It can also summarize cultures and traditions, and most importantly, it invites us to relate with other people. You can find recipes, restaurant reviews, and travel planning information on her blog. She also founded GenerationRice.com, an online magazine for Asians and Asian Americans. And hey, she should at least get points for creating such a long domain name!

#2 iFood.tv is a great site for videos on cooking and recipes. Forget about the Food Network, browse around and see if you find somebody new that you enjoy watching or upload your own videos. The site is built in a community fashion, great for meeting other foodies if you so choose.

#1 Dining Fever.com offers coupons at restaurants in the NYC area though they are soon expanding to other cities. You can get discounts like 20% or 15% off your entire bill if you call their specific reservation line and use the DiningFever code. Granted you won’t find a discount for Babbo on there, but I’ve caught listings for some pretty decent places in Manhattan.