Community cookbooks have been around forever, so the notion of crowdsourcing home recipes really predates the rise of social media. But employing Twitter to help collect recipes, share cooking advice, and galvanize a community around a shared love of food? That’s certainly a new venture, and one that freelancer Merrill Stubbs and former New YorkTimes Magazine food editor Amanda Hesser worked hard to create. Their popular online recipe community, Food52, recently finished their contest for the best home made recipes, the winners of which will be published in the first Food52 cookbook to be released in 2011 (the curation of cookbook No. 2 is underway).
The two met while researching for The Essential New York Times Cookbook, which Hesser edited, and will be released in late October. “We don’t want to be yet another site that insists on dumbing down recipes to make them “quick” and “easy” — so we won’t,” states the site. Here, Hesser talks about why the duo decided to start Food52, how they built a community around the site, and the advent of Foodpickle, the first real-time food Q&A.
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How did you get the idea for a crowdsourced cookbook, and why did you choose to execute the project this way?
The idea came from a project that Merrill and I worked on together, The Essential New York Times Cookbook, which is coming out this month. In doing the research for that book, we essentially crowdsourced some of the recipes we were testing. We asked New York Times readers what were some of their favorite recipes and got an incredible response — it became this invaluable thread throughout the book. It set the foundation of what recipes we were going to test, and the recommendations were really reliable and great. We also noticed that a lot of recipes that had resonated with readers over the decades at The New York Times tended to come from home cooks, not from chefs. There were obviously many terrific chef recipes that were recommended, but there was something about a recipe by home cooks that really resonated with other home cooks and readers. We just felt like there was something there, and we were really interested in applying the concepts of crowdsourcing and curation online. While there are many food sites and many good ones, we felt that what was lacking was the voice of the people — the celebration of the people who may not be professionals in the food world, but they know a lot about food, they’re incredibly passionate, [and] they have information to share. There wasn’t a whole lot of curation going on. We feel like that’s really important, particularly with recipes, and that’s why we started the site focusing just on recipes. Now we’re starting to branch out into other things.
| “While there are many food sites and many good ones, we felt that what was lacking was the voice of the people — the celebration of the people.” |
You’ve had a lot of experience writing about food. What did you apply from your previous media experience to form your approach to compiling this cookbook?
Part of my job when I was food editor of the Times and also when I was a reporter was to point [out] which direction trends were heading and essentially curate what was out there. What we felt like we could lend to a crowdsourcing site was that people could send in their recipes and we could use our experience as food editors and trained cooks and writers to tease out the recipes that really had original ideas in them, that seemed particularly promising, and then let the crowd take the curation process from there by voting on which recipes should win.
What is one thing that surprised you about the contributions and feedback that you got from the crowd?
We were heartened to find that there were not only great cooks out there, but ambitious cooks who weren’t daunted by recipes that have multiple steps. I was really impressed by how many people have new ideas week after week, and they really have adventurous palates and just really know their way around a kitchen. I guess we expected people would have certain areas that they would gravitate towards. And surely that has happened — there are the bakers out there who any time we have a dessert or baking theme, they leap on it. But there are a whole slew of cooks who are just willing to and also really want to create new dishes no matter what the theme is every week. That’s the best thing because it actually says something culturally, which is that Americans have reached a point — and I say Americans, just because the large majority of our community members are Americans — have reached a point in their comfort with food that they really have great conviction and are totally at ease in the kitchen experimenting and are not afraid to put their ideas out there in the public realm, which is a really big step forward.
For this project, you really wove social media strategy into the way you collected the recipes. Can you tell us a little bit about Foodpickle and how it helps promote engagement for your project?
FoodPickle grew out of two things, really. One was that as food editors and writers, we are constantly being asked food questions by friends, family, strangers. Because no matter what level cook you are, everyone has food questions. The thing that is unique about food and cooking questions are that they tend to need fast responses because you’re in the grocery store trying to make a decision about an ingredient, or you’re at the stove and something’s not looking quite right and you need someone to ask. So this is something that we thought a lot about over the years, and additionally in the past year in writing Food52, we just discovered that anytime someone on the site had a cooking question, people tended to leap in and respond quickly, thoroughly, and knowledgeably.
And additionally, just through my own experience with Twitter when I was working on The Essential New York Times Cookbook, if I had questions like where to place a recipe in the book, which chapter should it go in, how should it be categorized, what is the source of some kind of ingredient, people answered instantly and they were happy and generous, they wanted to share their knowledge and also they wanted to help you resolve your issue. Watching these things happen and having the available technology of social sites like Twitter, we felt like it was a natural progression: create a place on the site where people could ask questions, integrate it with Twitter so people could ask questions from Twitter, and people who know a lot about food could follow our Twitter feed.
The other thing that we built into that was that it was social, so that if you ask a question it gets broadcast out to Twitter, if you respond it gets broadcast to Facebook; additionally we built in a reward system. Every week we name the “Best Food Pickler,” and that’s a subjective decision based on the quality of responses, how active you’ve been, the spirit of generosity, incredibly engaging answers, etc. And that person gets this really nice prize from Viking. We’re trying to build a community and have people rewarded for great participation.
Food52 has a second book in the pipeline. What are you trying to do differently with this one?
For the first Food52 cookbook, we ended the contest in June, and [the book] will come out in the spring. The second contest just started in September, and we polled our community because we go to them for any big decisions, and said, “What do you think? What should we do for the next book?” It was really fascinating because there were some people who thought we should do a specific theme, but very few people actually did. We had said perhaps we could do a regional cookbook, or we could do holidays. The overwhelming majority wanted us to keep it the same system because they liked the surprise, they didn’t know what was coming week to week, they liked that it was seasonal. The only thing that we changed actually is that last year we would run two themes per week, and this year we’re running one, so we’re going to do more wild card winners. People can upload any recipe to the site at any time, and we just keep an eye on them in the background and test them when we see ones that are good, and then we name a wild card winner. The idea behind that was simply for it to be fun so that people could be surprised and awarded when they didn’t necessarily expect to be.
Do you have any advice for someone who wants to break into food-related media?
I think that it would be a great idea to work at a food website because you would learn a lot about everything from the editorial to the technical. You would be left with a sense of how online media works, and then potentially come up with your own idea for a startup. I think it’s best to just dive in. Tons of people have blogs, and we encourage that as well, but just getting on the ground experience in a food website is the way to go.
Amanda and Merrill’s Tips for Aspiring Food Writers
1. Learn to cook so you understand the medium.
2. When you eat out, always go to a different place, and try as many dishes as possible, especially ones outside your comfort zone.
3. Write a blog (not an original tip, but must be said) .
4. Work in the food business — on a farm, in a shop, as a waitress, as a cook, on a fishing boat. Personal experience is invaluable.
5. Eat some more.
NEXT >> Turn Food Blogging into a Full-Fledged Career
Jessica Roy is a freelance writer and the community manager at social media startup Context Optional.
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