What would you like to see in your dream food blog?
I am in the process of starting up my own food blog. I have no hopes or aspirations of being huge or making money, it will solely be a labor of love and an outlet for my love of food to share with the world.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a specific niche that will be targeting and was looking to crowd source opinions on what people would feel they would like in a food blog. I’m hoping to avoid suggestions like “less convoluted stories about your grandmothers tablecloth for 3 pages before the recipe” since I think we can all agree on that front.
Some of you may be thinking the world needs another blog like you need another asshole, and that may be true. However, part of my impetus was that many of the recipe blogs I find online have the same generic 30-40 recipes with minimal variation. Others of higher quality are moving behind paywalls. My goal is to try to include slightly more obscure recipes from all over the world, tried/tested/optimized for simplicity in cooking and flavor, or more unique variations on more common recipes. I also aspire to do some articles a bit more experimental / scientific in nature in the vein of some of J Kenji Lopez Alts articles a la serious eats but that is a larger aspiration for down the road.
I welcome any suggestions or sharing of your current favorite food blogs. I know the current social media trend is YouTube, TikTok, and the like. However as I find myself here with you all, you may understand my preference for sticking with the written word (and occasional photos). Cheers!
To put it bluntly, I'd love to see more clear cut recipes with detailed instructions and less "story" behind the food. Not every dish needs some kind of epic tale behind it that takes a few minutes of scrolling just to get to the actual recipie. I'm sure you know what I mean by that.
Completely agree with you there!
Agreed, but I thought that the search engine(s, as if it's not a monopoly) kinda dictated that.
If you just give people what they want you don't show up in the searches, and the best you can do is the "jump to recipe" button.
So you’re saying recipes shouldn’t have flavor text?
I am and I stand by it. Just post the recipie so people can put dinner on the table faster and get it over with. The storybook magic comes out in the taste and quality of the food.
The nice thing about flavor text on card games it comes after the card description...
Some people can’t stomach it when you try to spice things up
I suppose it all depends on your intentions
Want to share a cool recipe for others to make? Put it front and center with minimal fuss.
Want to maximize user time on page and ad refresh count? Bury the instructions in the middle of several paragraphs of text
Before I even got to the part where you mentioned it I was thinking “food from around the world adapted to what you can easily buy locally” so plus one for you there!
Something I really enjoy is when the blurb around the recipe gives you reasons for a technique or ingredient, eg “most recipes use x here but I’ve used y for z reasons” or “traditionally this is done using x technique because of y effect on flavour”. Substitutions, not just dietary but also in case you can’t find an ingredient or want to make it on the fly with things you already have, are also really helpful.
Mostly though I think that if you’re passionate, and that shines through in your writing and recipes, then it will already be a blog I’d be more interested in. You can really tell when people are just content creators that have to schedule their next post rather than doing it for the joy of sharing! If that means less frequent posts, or sporadic posts, that’s preferable to three a week that are phoned in
Great suggestions, thank you! Yes I agree, sometimes certain techniques or ingredients are introduced “because that’s how it’s always been done” but I also wish I learned more the science / rationale behind those decisions to learn more, so will strive to include that!
Great idea on ingredient substitutions, especially those hard to source. Thanks for the suggestions and words of encouragement!
"slightly more obscure recipes from all over the world, tried/tested/optimized for simplicity in cooking and flavor" , science, and no SEO garbage : I'm already on board.
It's not a food blog, so maybe you don't want to dive into more content, but in case you are interested... Mr. Money Moustache is a blog created by someone who is passionate about personal finance and also about life and it just shines through his content. I've kind of left it behind, but especially from the first three years (and you can sort by oldest or newest content). As I said, the first few years especially, he just wrote an amazing blog and it became quite popular.
With regard to a food and recipe blog, I would love to see content in various categories such as frugal meals, quick to prepare meals, impressive but easy to prepare dishes, holiday suggestions and more. Best of luck and please announce it here when you are comfortable. I understand that that might not be day one depending on your preferences, but I would love to see it.
Huge fan of MMM as well! I have to give him a lot of credit and don’t think I’m as gifted a writer as him but that’s a fantastic suggestion for a well received blog to borrow ideas from.
Thanks very much for the ideas and motivating comments, I will absolutely share my blog here once I accumulate some content!
Re writing skill, as an old coach of mine used to say, practice makes better.
If you want resources re writing, I'm sure this community has suggestions available on request. But basically, go for it! : )
I agree! As someone who's really dumb in the kitchen... I usually have no idea why a recipe calls for a certain ingredient or why a certain step is done in the cooking process. I would love to get a bit of understanding of the reasoning behind the choice of ingredients and the process.
Haven't seen it said yet so: please include metric measurements (Serious Eats is the best for doing this)! I don't know where you're based but there are lots of fantastic recipes coming from presumably American food blogs and it is so painful to have to continually look up conversions from cups to grams. I do it because I think it's worth it, but it is a proper annoyance.
Having the option to scale up the recipe is something that a few websites do too which is also really handy but less essential.
Lastly I'd love it if you had any suggestions for variations at the end of the recipe. If you think something would taste great with the addition of chorizo, or if some of the ingredients were charred/ roasted, or if it could easily be made vegan or gluten free with some substitutes you recommend, I'd want to hear it :)
Awesome suggestions! I am US based but also convert everything to metric because the imperial measurement system is nonsense so I will definitely do that!
But please show both :) Some of us fossils don't know how to navigate metric in cooking easily.
Deal!
Would an imperial <> metric toggle above the recipe card be ideal?
Others have already called out wishes that I agree with.
One more I'll add and this is for general blogging, not just a food blog.
I know running a blog isn't cheap. And if you start getting a lot of traffic, your costs may increase and you may need to place ads (advertising) on your blog. I totally get that. If you need to ads, then fine. However, please, for the love of whatever is sacred to you, don't place an ad in between every paragraph. I don't want to read a blog post with one recipe which has maybe all of 375 words and be spammed by 19 ads.
I love supporting small blogs by disabling uBlock on personal blogs, but if your blog has more than one or two ads per page, not only will I enable uBlock, but I will 100% of the time completely block your URL and I'll never visit it again.
I'll tell you what I don't want to see!
deep fried dishes
excessively sweetened creations, ideally everything is sweetened with fruits
recipes using whipped cream and similar ingredients which are extremely high in either sugar, fat or carbohydrates
exorbitant use of oil or fats to grill or saute food
Great starting point: different sorts of goulashes, Bul Go Gil, Sun dubu Jigae, Momos / Mandus, etc.
In other words, please make us health-aware foodies your audience and I'll consume that stuff as if there was no tomorrow.
I've also started blogging gain and, if you want, we could explore the creation of a web ring or something :)
Web ring: oh yeah baby let's party like it's 1995. Maybe we can curate a tiny garden of links where content is completely interesting to search engines but is optimised for humans instead.
Have you heard of the concept "digital garden" ? Look it up, it's what I'm aiming my blog to be. Having said that, if this sort of stuff interests you, I've been wanting to start an indy magazine (think aeon) for YEARS, do you want to tinker around?
Have a look at Marginalia, I've already submitted my blog for crawling :)
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=site%3Ajdsalaro.com&profile=default&js=default
thanks for linking this! and yeah, maybe we wouldn't want to give up ALL of web 2.0, but to have a little garden corner for respite, and to cultivate better, more nutritionally dense content would be nice
Thanks for those suggestions, those are wonderful! I totally agree with you as well, I am a bit anti sweets and also desire to focus on healthier recipes (particularly since I have a medical/nutrition background).
Briefly perused your blog, it looks awesome!
That's wonderful! Please ping me when you start posting :)
That's so kind of you, I really appreciate the feedback :)
If it's a labor of love and not intended to make money or get famous, and you're fine if with just paying for hosting costs, then you don't actually have to think about targeting a niche or audience at all, you can just do whatever you want.
I love how blogs used to be before they got search-engine-optimized and monetized... they were really more like personal journals, rather than poorly disguised advertising. Maciej Ceglowski's blog is a great example, I like that he just writes about whatever he feels like, including informative essays and personal travel memoirs.
Comments above already have great suggestions for presenting recipes. I think "food blog" is broad enough that you could also have other content aside from recipes, if you want. It could be anything related to food, for example, reviews of books by authors like Michael Pollan / whoever helped you in your personal food learning journey. I hope you enjoy expressing yourself through your blog!
I like to know the science behind some recipes (especially with baking/fermenting) but if you’ve already looked at J Kenji Lopez then you’ll be aiming at the kind of thing I’m after.
If you’re from America, put metric quantities of ingredients, and metric oven temperatures. If your going to be doing baking, don’t put use cups (I always skip recipes that use cups for baking).
If you’re writing recipes, cut down on the story. I just want the recipe and nothing else. If you’re writing about food in general or a specific topic then more long form writing is fine.
Nice photos. They don’t have to be studio/professional quality. But better than some of the (frankly) awful pictures people post on sites like allrecipes.com
Another bug bear of mine, is sites not clearly showing how many servings a recipe is for, or how many X the recipe will make.
Good luck, hope it goes well and you come back to give us a link to it when it’s ready!
Great ideas and agree with everything you wrote. I am actually obsessed with fermentation as well and so am planning to dedicate a good portion of my efforts towards accessible food fermentation recipes, especially those more off the beaten path / novel variations.
Frankly I haven't followed a food blog since I was a teenager.
That being said, I have bookmarked a few websites to use a reference later, and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't come back to them every once in a while to see what they've done.
Nowadays, though, the thing you'd have to do to get me to do that is to be in the specific dietary niche that I'm in - the whole foods plant based diet. Complete with the no added sugar salt or oil rule.
I'm going to go a bit against the grain here and say I actually like editorializing and story-telling in this kind of content if--and only if--what you're saying is relevant, entertaining, and sincere, and not just SEO management. Bourdain was great at this, as were a few others. But I would put it after the recipe, not before.
I also very much enjoy the science behind food, like Kenji gets into. My dream food blog would have deep dives into both, with a heavy dash of history where it makes sense, but I know it's a tall order. I couldn't do it myself, and wish I could. My dream in this context is that I would rather have 3000 words that gets into the science and history behind a dish, with some personal anecdotes and opinion writing once a month vs. 3 posts per week of "five basic ways to spice up your instant ramen". At its best, Saveur Magazine was pretty good at this, if you want a comparison.
RE: the recipes themselves, I bias towards things that are relatively simple and easy to make with groceries you can find locally. But I think it's totally fine FTR to have occasional posts with "fun" or more obscure recipes that take $50 worth of groceries that's not for everyday, just to change it up a bit and explore a menu.
Thanks for the recommendation, I have heard of but haven’t read Saveur magazine, I’ll check it out!
If you want to have 17 pages of back story before the recipe, cool. Do your thing. But please, PLEASE have a large (not hidden) "Jump to Recipe" button at the very top. Make it big and obvious.
I would also like to request that it ACTUALLY jumps to the recipe and not half a page above, making me scroll through a bunch of ads first.
This is my own perspective, but when I'm searching for recipes or dishes from foods around the world I much prefer to find recipes written by people from that area.
Not out of some gate-keeping sensibility, but because flavour preferences and cooking philosophies can differ depending on what you grew up with, and I like testing tastes or techniques that are unfamiliar to me.
I have a tendency to mistrust recipes adapted by someone not of that culture, that dont clearly explain what is being adapted and why, because I question: did this person adapt the recipe in the same way someone coming from a different food culture or philosophy would?
If I ultimately need to sub out ingredients, then I make that choice on my own and i at least know why i had to.
I hope that makes some sense, and this perspective is helpful for thinking how you might approach your blog.
My ideal recipe blog is a cookbook. No ads, auto-play videos or product links. Stories either add crucial context or don't exist at all.