Cookthink: Like Pandora For Recipes
Duncan Riley
23 comments »
Washington DC based Cookthink bills itself as being like Pandora for recipes with a tested cooking database that returns results based on user desires.
The key pitch of Cookthink is the “cookthink it” search tool. Users enter what they are craving and Cookthink suggest a good recipe to match those cravings. Ingredients can be combined, for example if you had cravings for a pasta dish that included bacon and mushrooms, you could add all three to the search and the service will return a recipe.
Recipes can be searched using four categories of tags: mood (eg, hangover-friendly), ingredient (eg, chicken), cuisine (eg, Tex-Mex) and dish type (eg, quesadilla). For each recipe, Cookthink suggests complimentary recipes for the dish, and links are provided to relevant cooking tips and techniques.
Cookthink also offers a meal builder, with which users can create and save meals using recipes on the site.
There is absolutely no shortage of recipe sites on the web with often very little between them. Along with the rich search and feature set, Cookthink promises that every recipe on the site has either been tested in-house or by one of the members of the “Cookthinktank,” a confederation of food bloggers and cookbook authors whose recipes are searchable at Cookthink. Basically they aren’t suggesting recipes that haven’t been tested by someone related to the site.
The site is currently privately funded and will look to raise venture capital in the northern Spring.
I think this is an awesome idea.
Pretty much every recipe site out there claims to be able to tell you recipes based on what you have in the fridge.
On using the site it seems to me that all cookthink have done is slow down the searching process into laborious step-by-step affair. In principle I like the idea, but I think it could be executed more intuitively. And personally, although tag lists are something of a necessary evil, I think it’s incredibly lazy to just spew them at a user on their first visit to the site; do you want your users to find something to eat, or to sit there reading?
Of course my points might have to be taken with a pinch of salt when you consider that I just relaunched the brand new OPEN SOURCE FOOD! http://www.opensourcefood.com (seriously, weird timing with this article).
Duncan, you seem to be into food…any chance of a write-up? It’s a one-man-project (me as designer / developer) being paid for out of my own pocket. I’m based in Tokyo and can send Japanese tentacle porn as a bribe.
I put in “chicken mcnuggets, large fry and a coke” but nothing came back.
Cookthink seems like a great idea. I discovered it on Go2Web20.net a while back. The execution of the idea did not work as well as I hoped though..
I like Allen Stern’s comment : ) - in all seriousness, though, I would enter tags into Cookthink such as eggs, cheese, and bacon - expecting tasty breakfast food - and then receive the suggestion “Savory Egg Custard With Cheese”… What ? The suggestions from Cookthink didn’t suite my appetite, but I’ll keep watching this website as it grows.
My favorite Web 2.0 website for recipes is http://grouprecipes.com. They have a large database of recipes and a broad social network that is a great combination.
There’s lots of interesting stuff happening online with home cooking. Another one is, Cooking With Friends.
Mmmm. Food.
Enough with all the recipes sites already. Sheesh.
This space is SO saturated (has been for a DECADE) and all these new entries have VERY little chance of making any headway against Foodnetwork, Allrecipes, Recipezaar, et all.
Quite simply, there isn’t a terrible amount of innovation possible (or needed) in the space.
No Filipino food?
I find it a bit cumbersome how cookthink does their recipe matching. Also, there seems to be no support for planning out more than one meal or even building a shopping list like http://www.tastyplanner.com has.
Too difficult to get what you want. Left the site after only a few minutes. Fail.
Let me also put in a quick mention of my site, BigOven.com. We’ve also got the “enter what what’s in your fridge” feature, and the search includes over 160,000 recipes. One unique angle is the integration with optional desktop recipe software that lets you calculate nutrition facts for any recipe, and drag and drop recipes onto a grocery list or meal plan.
BigOven has grown rapidly with several social features over the past year — post your own cooking videos, rate recipes with others, RSS feeds of peoples “Favorites” and “Try Soon” lists, the ability to add recipes to your friends’ food lists, social groups focusing on everything from Weight Watchers to Diabetic cooking, etc. We’ve just crossed 80,000 members, are profitable, and privately held. Happy cooking!
http://www.i-guide.ro/blog/Ro/en/
cool post
How about cocktail ’s has somebody made the same for cocktail ’s ?
BigOven.com has over 10,000 cocktail recipes in its database, including dozens of martini, cosmopolitan, etc. recipes… but there are certainly also sites that focus specifically on the cocktail/bar area.
Ofcouce CooksThink
http://www.jhatak.com/Buckler/BucklerHomePage.htm
1998 called and they want their site back. Not very well designed, and not very well executed. Do keep an eye on opensourcefood.com though.
I tried this site a bit, but I felt this website is useless. If you want new recipes, google search will show tons of better recipes.
I think “cookthink” needs something more exciting, such as posting youtube movie links to show “how to cook” at least some difficult recipes.
lol ! isnt that what every recipe site with a search function do ?!!
I just dont get it ….
You can say its a social networking site for Chef and housewives.
This is a great idea, but I guess it will take time before it starts giving relevant results. I played with it a bit, but didn’t find anything close to what I would have expected. I’ll try to remember to check back in 6 months or so to see if it’s getting better.
masahiro, http://www.ifood.tv has many videos on cooking . We actually have the craving feature too - its called “what do you want to eat today” and gives recipe results. We are building a chef shimono recommendation engine for recommeding recipes based on cravings at this time. And lots of other cool features are in the pipeline
Needs work.
Did a search for “seafood, marinade, central asia, easy” and got a Seattle Fish stew which takes about 1hr 30min to make, contains 16 ingredients and buku prep.
I’d say that is almost the complete opposite of what I searched. Seafood was the only match.
Like #19 I’ll try again at a later date.
Most definitely opensourcefood.com is the best of all these food social network sites. The problem with most of these sites is the messy design and unclear purpose. The nice thing about opensourcefood is the fact that photos are an essential part of the site. People don´t want text recipes, google is a much better tool for finding any text based recipe.
Depends on what you’re looking for. OSF has some nice images, yes, but no how-to videos. Grouprecipes and BigOven let people post cooking videos. And the latter has recipe software where you can keep things locally if you’d like (if you’re a big recipe collector).