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Recipe requests are common enough that we have a custom close reason for it. Unfortunately, when we close these questions, we don't really help the user at all, not even by pointing them to a better place to look. Sometimes friendly users add a comment about searching, but that's not really something to depend on.

So: is it worth trying to curate a list of recipe sites and ways to search for recipes as a community wiki question/answer? Why, or why not? If we do, is there anything we should keep in mind?

(If we do think this is a good idea, I volunteer to take care of it. It'd still be depending on the community to provide the actual things to link to, but I'll keep it clean.)

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Yes.

The rough conclusion from the chat discussion was essentially that people like this idea, and in order to keep it manageable (both for readers and curators) it needs to be fairly restricted to "big" sites, and not require too too much detail per site.

I have some lists to start from and will post something once I have time to get it all together.

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In general, I like the idea of a community wiki listing of websites.

I wonder if, rather than a single list of sites it might be worth it to have each site have an answer of its own that is required to be neutrally worded and should follow a "fill in the form" format that requires submissions to include some base information that people who cook appreciate including things like:

  • Name of site/link
  • Free/pay wall
  • can you create a log-in to save favorite recipes in a digital recipe box?
  • country of origin/language/s
  • what sorts of measurements (g/oz, F/C... etc)
  • are measurements (particularly for baking) in volumes or weights
  • is user commentary/rating allowed
  • do they allow users to submit recipes
  • Content type (written recipes, videos)
  • Type of site - this can be things like
    • whether the site is based on a famous person's recipes
    • if it's scientifically based
    • native region of the food (if any)
    • if it specializes in certain types of dietary needs (vegetarian, gluten free, low-calorie, brand-specific, etc).
    • associated sites
  • basic site description paragraph

There are probably others I'm not thinking of but we can put the "form" in the question and tell people that answers submitted should use the form and fill in all of the blanks that they can and leave any they can't with the default N/A.

My reason for suggesting that each site be an answer is that it will give users the opportunity to "rate" the sites buy voting up sites they like and down sites they don't and allows people to leave comments specific to the site rather than to the entire list. Also, for huge sites like FoodNetwork.com, it gives more space to specify notes about some of the specific cooks featured on the site.

This could be done in a single extremely long post but I feel like one of the benefits of the SE format is being able to show some sort of support for some answers and disagreement with others. This will help users looking for good sites because the sites that have consensus for their quality will be at the top of the list while the less-liked sites will drift towards the bottom. The community wiki format would prevent people from earning rep for popular answers (which I think is good).

Perhaps it makes sense to make one topic for English sites and one for non-English?

As an example:

America's Test Kitchen

  • Pay site
    • limited free access
    • $34.95-69.95/year USD
  • Account required, allows users to save favorite recipes.
  • USA/English
  • Uses American measurements
  • Gives some measurements in both weight and volume
  • No user commentary/rating system
  • No user recipe submission
  • content is available as printed recipes and some is available as instructional videos
  • General interest site
    • based on results extensive recipe focus-group testing
    • no native region
    • associated with Cooks Illustrated and Cook's Country
    • also recommends specific grocery products and cooking equipment based on in-house testing.

(I don't feel like writing a paragraph right now... maybe it's optional or not necessary)

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    I was thinking of something with way less information per site than this. If you get to the point of paragraphs, the list becomes a lot less useful since you'll have to read through so much; it's easier just to see if a short description makes it sound useful and go look at it. I definitely agree about neutral, though. It's a list of sites, with some amount of factual description of what they include. They'd probably be categorized, but otherwise be in arbitrary/alphabetical order. No ranking, no reviewing.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Jun 30, 2015 at 0:16
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    And based on past experience with things like this, I'm unfortunately going to veto the one idea per answer thing. Voting breaks down when you have that many answers (people don't vote on things past the first page, and older things get way more votes than newer ones). It removes any ability to categorize things. It spreads the content out so you have to scroll more (or even click next page) to see the same amount. And it just makes it a pain to curate - which is bad because it means curators tend to eventually get discouraged and let things lapse.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Jun 30, 2015 at 0:18
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    @Jefromi then how do you determine if a site "deserves" to be listed? There are a lot of really, really crappy sites out there.
    – Catija
    Jun 30, 2015 at 0:19
  • Basically, it has to be big enough, searchable, and useful enough that at least one person cares to add it. No blogs (they're "small"). If people start fighting over what gets to be listed, whoever's saddled with maintaining the list gets to decide (probably me), and we can take it to meta if it's a big deal. But in practice, with anything like this, the community mostly loses interest after a while, and here aren't going to be any big fights, just periodic additions. (If I'm wrong and people end up bickering about it, we'll just get rid of it.)
    – Cascabel Mod
    Jun 30, 2015 at 0:23
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    To be more general: I understand that there are a lot of crappy things, I'm just saying that voting isn't going to solve that problem. You end up with obvious answers pinned at the top, having been voted on for a year, and new awesome answers mixed in with crap at the bottom because so few people have seen them and voted.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Jun 30, 2015 at 0:25
  • I should say: I'm still in favor of trying to provide as much of that kind of information as possible, but in the form of a list that's as short as possible, so as to fit on perhaps two lines - one for a short description, one for the quick facts (along the lines of "free, no account required, English, American units, has reviews"). That way you can still skim through the list quickly.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Jun 30, 2015 at 1:34
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I'd love to be able to post recipes and help other users with their recipe. It could be done through stack by either a sub category on seasoned advice or a new stack all together. We have a great community and recipes can be used in so many community based ways.

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    This is not what was asked in the question. If you want to try to make a recipe site, you can try on area 51 (but I believe it's been tried before, and you're not likely to succeed); if you want to try to make recipe requests on topic on Seasoned Advice, you can post a new question on meta (but they're off-topic for very good reason, so don't expect positive response). This question is merely about making a list of sites like Allrecipes, Epicurous, BBC Good Food, and so on, where you can go to find recipes.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Jul 21, 2015 at 0:54

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