I’ve taken to cooking again, so I’ve been hunting down recipes online. Although googling recipes has been straightforward and effective so far, I want to be able to save recipes, notes, and reviews in a central location. Do any of the plethora of online recipes website stand out from the others? This post briefly notes three top options.
- Epicurious.com: If you are looking for a website that “has it all,” then Epicurious is probably it. One glance at TopTenReviews’ comparison chart reveals that Epicurious far outpaces the competition in its features, and the review itself highlights the site’s inclusion of restaurant reviews and excellent online community, featuring user-generated video how-tos.
- AllRecipes.com: Although TopTenReviews puts them in at #7 in their top ten, TopTenReviews can tend to focus too much on just counting up cool features and too little on actual usability. With sites like Yelp likely better for restaurant reviews than any online recipe site, some of the fancy add-ons at Epicurious seem frivolous if all you’re really looking for are recipes, which AllRecipes delivers above and beyond any other site. Unlike other top-rated sites, AllRecipes has had a recipe for all of my recent dishes, and they’ve all been accurate and delicious. With stuff like indentation and font styling, the layout of each recipe here is more readable than at Epicurious.
- Google & Diigo: As much as I’m starting to like AllRecipes, you probably won’t be able to find every recipe you want there, so you’ll inevitably resort to googling recipes off other sites. Unless you want to be a dedicated AllRecipes contributor, you’ll want an easy way to save recipes from other sites, for which an online bookmarking site like Diigo or Delicious should do the trick. In fact, you could just skip the membership at AllRecipes and/or Epicurious altogether and keep all your recipes tagged as such through your bookmarking service.
In any case, it probably does not make a whole lot of sense to post recipes to your blog, unless it specializes specifically in cooking. For my part, I’m moving my recently posted chai recipe to AllRecipes and will continue to review recipes there but save the ones I like to Diigo.
