How many cooks does it take to produce the perfect recipe? I’d say one, a really good one. Barnaby Dorfman thinks that 1,000 cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef, and earlier today he launched Foodista around that premise. It is a Wikipedia for food. Each recipe can be collaboratively edited and improved. Scrumptious photos for each dish are pulled in from Flickr, and descriptions are pulled in from Wikipedia itself. You can add or remove ingredients, see the edit history, or add a comment to each page.
The site is well-designed and was put together by Dorfman and two other co-founders on their own dime. It will have to overcome some pretty stuff competition from both established sites like AllRecipes and the Food Network, as well as new cooking sites like Cookstr (read our review) and Open Source Food.
But Dorfman thinks he can do better than all of those sites by collecting better data and organizing it in a smarter way. Foodista borrows not only from Wikipedia, but also from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), part of which Dorfman used to run when he was at Amazon a few years ago. Every recipe, ingredient, cooking technique, and kitchen utensil links to every other mention of the same thing throughout the site. Dorfman says:
We are taking a structured-data approach to cooking.
Getting the data model right makes it easier to find related recipes along any given dimension. It also will open the door to lots of cool features down the road, like figuring out the nutritional value of each recipe. The entire site, by the way, is built entirely on Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, and SimpleDB).
The biggest issue facing Foodista is whether a collaborative approach to cooking can ever work. The entire premise of the site is that 1,000 contributors can somehow come up with the perfect recipe. But as any foodie can tell you, many times there is no standard recipe for a dish. There are always variations, which is what makes cooking interesting. Your mother cooks chicken soup differently than mine.
As Dorfman was telling me about his site the other day, I looked up the recipe for cassoulet. One of the ingredients was curry. This is a French dish. Curry might make it taste better (although, I doubt it), but it doesn’t belong in the one standard recipe that Foodista presents. Dorfman simply took it out. I’m not sure who won that argument. Me, for pointing out a flaw in a recipe, or Dorfman, for showing how recipes could become better over time.
The problem is they could also become worse over time, or simply devolve to a bland consensus. Why not allow variations? Dorfman is not opposed to that, but what he wants to avoid is to have “50 cassoulet recipes, and they are all the same.” Fair enough, but let’s at least start with the best recipes.
A few spot checks don’t give me a lot of confidence that all of the recipes are quite yet up to snuff. For instance, take the entry for cioppino, a seafood stew usually made with white wine. The recipe lists both red and white wine, which is just wrong on so many levels. It’s like cooking with a rosé.
My other issue with the site is that it pulls random photos of the dish in question from Flickr, which do not show the recipe you are trying to prepare. This was the case with the cassoulet entry. It showed a picture with a big duck leg confit, which is a key ingredient. But that ingredient wasn’t listed in the recipe (I added it). The reason cookbooks come with big pictures is because food is visual and, for the cook, it helps to visualize what you are trying to create. That means the pictures and the recipes have to match.
These are minor quibbles. I’m sure the wiki cooking hordes will prove me wrong in the end.
i’m a fan of behindtheburner.com, have found some really cool stuff on there
I for comment, thanks you http://www.jugargame.com/
I agree with Erick. I doubt the really good cooks are going to use this website and without really good cooks contributing it’s pointless. Why would I want a site with contributions from average cooks? A while bunch of C level cooks don’t equal one A level one.
For example, I looked up the recipe for pho, a dish I know quite intimately having eaten it all my life. No where did I see the essential spices and herbs that make up the essence of the beef broth. Instead, I got a link to standard beef broth which is like getting beef soup, adding some noodles, and calling it pho. Not quite the same.
I love the idea of cooking 2.0 but I don’t think the strength around this website will be around creating the “perfect recipe” because we all have different tastes and preferences. I might like a little more salt and you less, etc.
Concept is cute and I can’t wait to check out the rest of these websites!
The key here isn’t one recipe, it is a parent with many children. Each child would include a substitution of some sort so the recipe could fit the individuals needs (dietary, health or just preference). All recipes sites out there are one size fits all, or digital cookbooks with some sharing capabilities. This is a step in an interesting direction but needs to go one step further.
Ex. Taking a recipe, making a substitution that converts a recipe to be diabetes friendly, then tagging it as such (rinse repeat) would then allow for many people with diabetes to have alternatives. I am not sure that site exists today. The action happens but it is in the comments sections and the message boards that exist out there.
@Doug, re: the diabetes example, you might want to take a look at the tagging, recipe-linking and discussion group features on BigOven.com. Not all the way there yet, but moving in that direction. (We’re working on recipe versioning as well, which should arrive in 2009.)
@doug
isn’t that called the internet and a search engine? i don’t see a need for this site.
Take a look at the various recipes sites and look at the comments on the recipes, people are asking these questions. Then go to product sites like Betty Crocker and look at the message boards there. Same questions are being asked.
You are right, search does do some of this, however what if you really really want that chocolate cake, however can’t because of a certain dietary condition? Every other chocolate cake recipe you found on google just doesn’t look like it will be as good. Currently you settle for second best.
Congrats to the Seattle Foodista team for their launch today. Michael et al., I hope you also get a chance to check out my site BigOven.com, also in the Web 2.0 food arena. (The free BigOven iPhone app shipped less than 90 days ago and has been downloaded over a million times already.) There’s definitely room for a few players in this space… all the best!
(∩_∩)(∩_∩)♥♥__Mixedloving.c o m__♥♥ This is a particular place for single hot ladies and handsome guys looking for their love or friends of different races all around the world! Welcome to Join us and have your own profile to start chatting with them online right now! That is totally FREE!(∩_∩)(∩_∩)
Cassoluet had curry powder and it does not belong there? Hmmm. Perhaps it does. History might have a part to play? The French had colonies in India until mid-20th century and in fact French is still spoken in Pondicherry in South India. Then there is another historical fact: the Indian community in the island of Mauritius, which was also a French colony. The Indian community in Mauritius has been around for over 150 years and they speak fluent French or Creole and have infused quite a bit of their ingredients into classic French dishes. I wonder if that cross-pollination might have something to do with curry powder being included in Cassoluet? Just a thought.
Kamla Bhatt
cassoulet has been around for several hundreds of years. it’s not a recent invention having to do with spice trade from india.
http://en.wikip.../wiki/Cassoulet
having made the dish and studied with classically trained french chefs i can tell you curry has no place in cassoulet. this is the problem with recipes that can be modified by just anyone. the idea is just another jump on the 2.0 bandwagon without any real thought behind it.
They need some designer. I love cooking and I like to search for recipes online, but this site doesn’t invites me to surf their for hours.
Love the recipes but since when has chocolate ice cream has pork and beer in it?
How can they allow anyone to edit the recipes.
Moderation please.
I don’t like Foodista’s design and layout.
Usability is weak – no sections for cuisine (ex: Italian) or “related dishes”. The Blog component gets confused with the Wiki component. And there’s no “user rating”, so I don’t know what you mean by it having elements of IMDb.
A search also revealed “No exact match for pizza“… even though when I first visited the site, PIZZA was the featured article. And that Pizza article only allowed for ONE type of “pizza”.
Granted it’s only on Day One, but Foodista needs major improvements.
I like RecipeMatcher (http://www.recipematcher.com), which offers a much more useful function – finding recipes with what I already have at home.
i’d love to hear what these people would say about wikipedia on its launch day. the point here is not totality or precision – it is about a collaborative, community driven evolution of recipes. cool idea – i look forward to seeing how the site evolves along with the recipes.
marcd, you’ve obviously never cooked. when i make a recipe i like i don’t want to come back to it in two weeks to find it has totally changed due to “collaboration”. i want to find the same recipe that i made successfully and make it again. that’s the point behind a recipe.
if i want to experiment, i do it to my personal copy of the recipe. i don’t go to the book store and update every copy in every book i can find. the fact is cooking is about precision which is why this site is a bad idea.
on that note, i think it would be great if users could bookmark their “favorite revision” of a recipe.
or if you could make a variant of a recipe and register it as your favorite variant of a parent recipe.
Also lets all keep in mind that few websites are perfect at launch. Give there guys room to grow, respond to the community. I’m sure they’ll get there.
True. They kicked the ass outta Cuil’s launch! LOL.
This site has me drooling. Some nice pics along with the recipes too
wow am hungry already !
It sounds cool, but this site is going to suck. Just give it time. Everyone thinks they are a foodie because they can name 10 cheeses. In my experience, 10 out of 10 people can’t cook. There will be a few people posting amazing recipes and a lot of Food Network people adding in their “Bam!”’s and their rachel ray’s “holy cat look at that”, and before you know it…their sandra lee’s shitfest in a can.
One problem I saw right away is that there is no way to browse recipe categories. If you know what you are looking for, you can try search. Or, you can go to the blog and look at the categories. But, there is not currently a way to look at categories on the main site. Also, the searches don’t return the same results as the blog categories. For example, search for shellfish only returns Taco, though the blog shows six posts in that category.
This looks like a real interesting idea. I think it has the potential to evolve into something great. I think there can be too many cooks in the kitchen at once though.
Another cool new recipe RecipeKey.com lets you visually select the items you already have to find recipes.
I’m in love with the Big Oven iPhone app for recipes, but I’ll have to give this a try. I think they’re both Seattle upstarts.
Hi everyone! From our small team here at Foodista…thanks for all the feedback, suggestions, debate and PASSION! It’s very early days for us and we believe in rapid iteration, so lots more to come. Big thanks to Erick for the coverage.
On the collaborative editing debate, it will be interesting. Over time, I expect we will develop a spectrum of controls, similar to Wikipedia (http://en.wikip...otection_policy). I’m confident we can get to a place where we avoid duplication and have a structure that allows material differences to be highlighted.
One person was wondering how we are similar to IMDb…it’s in the use of structured data. If you look at one of our recipe pages, you will see that we link ingredients, kitchen tools, and cooking techniques. This is done entirely through an automated process that parses recipes, identifies items in our database, and links to them….similar to the way that IMDb links between cast lists and filmographies.
Happy Holidays!
Another recipe website…food is hot!