Posted on: Wednesday, March 23, 2005

World Wide food Web a big world, indeed

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

Personal computers and the Internet have opened a world of recipes, cooking instruction, food history and lore to home cooks. But sometimes it's difficult to tell which sites to trust.

Here's some information to guide you.

Several Web directories list sites that get lots of hits:

• yahoo.com/society_and_culture/food_and_drink/cooking/recipes — This site offers links to 167 culinary sites in the Yahoo directory, ranked by popularity. The top five here are all recipes.com, epicurious.com, globalgourmet.com, marthastewart.com and recipesource.com. You can search by various factors (ingredients, cookbooks, holidays, etc.). The links are described, so you know, for example, that culinary.net offers "kitchen-tested recipes developed by food and beverage companies and associations." If you're not interested in recipes designed to make the most of brand-name products, that wouldn't be the Web site for you.

• indexoftheweb.com/Food/Recipes.htm — This index of food- and recipe-related Web sites links mostly to commercial sites, clogged with pop-up ads; sites are often not responsive or updated. Top sites here include topsecretrecipes.com, cityline.ca, recipegoldmine.com, thriftyfoods.com, igourmet.com.

• alexa.com — Alexa.com is a company associated with Amazon.com that ranks Web sites by a combination of factors, including number of hits by different users and number of page views. While they don't have a specific ranking of food and drink sites, several culinary sites do appear in their Top 50 Sites list, including allrecipes.com (at No. 24), epicurious.com (at No. 29), kraftfoods.com (No. 30), cooks.com (No. 38), foodnetwork.com (No. 40) and recipebazaar.com (No. 48).

Some Web sites to check out:

• about.com/food — This Yahoo site resembles an online food magazine with articles on changing topics — "What are Trans Fats," "How to Fillet a Fish." The home page includes lists of most popular recent recipe searches and the search function brings up a recipe title and description. The site is divided up into subject content like a cookbook — Southern food, French food, and so on — and you can search within these or search the whole site. There are lots of sponsored links and a free newsletter to which you can subscribe. When you call up a recipe, the source is identified with a brief descriptor, and you get a pop-up guide to related recipes (and also pop-up ads); prep and cook time are given, as well as links to articles that might be helpful in preparing the recipe.

• allrecipes.com — Although you can search this site and download recipes without becoming a member, membership is the underpinning of this well-stocked site. It's meant to act as your personal online cookbook with a clipboard area where you can store recipes and find recipes you downloaded in the past. Members also submit recipes and review them. The search function allows you to look for recipes in various groupings, such as light favorites or fast family recipes or low-carb selections. If you subscribe to their Quick-Smart line of cookbooks, you can find recipes, scale them up to as many as 300 servings, print out shopping lists and recipe cards, and review and add personal notes to recipes. Recipe searches give you a title, first name of submitter, links to reviews and ratings, a one-line description of the recipe and a link to more recipes of the same type.

• cooks.com — Cooks.com is a wide-ranging Web site that includes discussion forums, a nutritional analysis function, daily featured articles, frequent updates, a subscription service for food magazines (which support the site) and thousands of recipes. One feature I've often used is the volume and measure conversion feature (under "unit calc"), which allows you to plug in an amount (15 tablespoons, for example) and see it immediately converted into other measures (cups, gallons, milliliters, pints, etc.); there's also information on how to measure and on abbreviations and on equivalents. While it isn't foolproof, since it doesn't take into account whether the food is dry or liquid and how heavy the food is, it's better than doing the math in your head. Another great thing about cooks.com is that, when you do a recipe search, the directory lists not just the recipe name but the first few lines of the instructions, the number of ingredients and the first few ingredients. When you're looking for a specific recipe, this allows you to eliminate many options without having to open the document.

• epicurious.com — Condé Nast's Web site in support of its Bon Appétit and Gourmet magazines is an online magazine with articles, a recipe search function, contests, reviews of restaurants and cookbooks, forums, visual guides to various techniques, shopping opportunities and ads, and a function that allows you to download recipes to your cell phone. Members can set up their own recipe boxes and enjoy some other features. Free recipe searches bring up title, ratings, reviews, source and date, plus icons that indicate whether it's quick, healthy and so on. One exceptional feature: From the recipe, you can link to tester's notes that go into great detail.

• foodnetwork.com — The Web site of TV's Food Network includes show schedules, seasonal articles, videos, a search function that allows you to find a particular show and another that allows you to search for recipes. Lots of shopping opportunities and ads. Recipe searches bring up recipe title, the show it was on, degree of difficulty and user ratings. Recipes link to others from the same episode. Graphics-intensive site can sometimes be slow. Because most recipes are from chefs, you're unlikely to find simple basics here; recipes are more complex.

• foodreference.com — This quirky Web site is the work of chef James T. Ehler of Key West, Fla., and is a compendium of all his worldly wisdom plus shopping opportunities and links galore. Ehler has long been working on a food encyclopedia and includes segments of this on the site, along with recipes, historical articles, tips, trivia, games, cartoons, commentary, a guide to food festivals and just about any other food-related topic you can image. Membership is free and includes a weekly newsletter. Recipe searches, powered by Google, bring up title and first words of recipe narrative. Recipes include prep and cooking time and nutritional analysis — a nice feature.

• globalgourmet.com — Hosted by cookbook author Kate Heyhoe, this lively 10-year-old site opens with an article or feature — a cookbook review or article about some food-related matter. Departments include Cookbooks, Global Destinations, I Love Desserts and On Wine, with articles and lots of recipes. This is a site that's a pleasure to read. Large archive; sophisticated recipes.

• ichef.com — This site offers links to thousands of recipes on this site and others. Membership allows you to contribute recipes, collect recipes, review or rate recipes and make your own PDF-format cookbook. Use of the site generates an annoying number of pop-ups, however. Recipe search brings up a list of recipes and the Web sites from which they come. When links fail, however, you're left in cyberspace, unable to use the "back" key to get back onto ichef. In-house recipes include titles and ratings.

• marthastewart.com — Click on the recipe index in the upper right, then use the recipe search function to find a recipe. You can narrow the search by clicking on various categories. We used a basic recipe — vanilla pudding — to test the search functions of all these Web sites, and this was the only site that had no vanilla pudding recipe. Recipes are specific to Martha Stewart magazines, cookbooks and the TV show. A recipe search brings up a title; accessing the title brings up a bare-bones recipe. Some current recipes and articles from Stewart's Everyday Food magazine are also accessible from the site.

• recipegoldmine.com — This Arizona-based Web site brings together not only recipes but crafts and gardening information, and it has an unpretentious, happy hands at home kind of feel. The site was designed with the visually impaired in mind; all recipes are in a large, bold, san-serif type. There is also a large selection of recipes for special diets (diabetic, wheat-free, gluten-free, low carbohydrate, etc.). Specialties include restaurant and copycat recipes, Southwest recipes, cake mix, slow-cooker and gift recipes. A kitchen section has conversion and equivalents charts, a glossary, hints and tips and lots of answers to frequently asked questions. Recipe search brings up every reference on the site in wordy, confusing format. Recipes include no additional information.

• recipesource.com — This bare-bones searchable online archive is divided up by ethnicity and type of dish, as well as a miscellaneous section that includes everything from cooking for pets to medieval recipes. You can search the whole site, or within an area. Recipe search brings up titles only; recipes include their source. If you're accessing the Internet on a slow, dial-up connection, this site is for you because it's virtually graphics-free and loads rapidly.

• topsecretrecipes.com — This site focuses on recipes that mimic popular franchise restaurant foods.