All the Recipe Sites in the World, and yet…There’s Still Something Missing
It started with shepherd’s pie, of all things. I had two or three versions of the recipe from different sites open in tabs, and I was taking bits and pieces from each to cobble together dinner. I didn’t have Worcestershire sauce (I used soy). I wanted to do half potatoes and half cauliflower for the mash (I know, roll your eyes). I wanted to make the filling a little bit spicier. Dinner was delicious. A month or two later… I could not remember what I’d changed. I Googled recipes but couldn’t find the same ones. And while it tasted fine the second time around, racking my brain for what exactly I’d done previously sucked.
I started talking to my more accomplished cook-friends about how they track recipe changes. This rudimentary survey was eye-opening. One friend prints out recipes and stores them in a kitchen drawer with notes in the margins. Another copies recipes into a Word doc with changes, a link to the original, and then saves them in a folder on her desktop. And not a single person said, “Oh, I don’t make changes.” Take a look at nearly any cooking website’s comments section and you’ll find tons of home cooks’ tweaks to recipes: They’re helpful, they’re worth reading before you even start to cook, but they are a totally unsustainable way to track your own and others’ changes. We have calorie-counting, menu-planning, alternate-flour-suggesting recipe sites but not one for properly tweaking (and remembering how we tweaked) our favorite recipes? It doesn’t add up.
So here we are. To Taste is because we all tweak recipes. To Taste is because I want to use it, my friends want to use it, all the chefs, bakers, bloggers, and authors I talked to want to use it. We should have a place to save the recipes we love to make, the way we love to make them. A place where we can try that sheet pan chicken dinner with asparagus and leeks instead of broccoli. Turns out, it’s delicious. It’s motivating and confidence-building to try those muffins with chopped apples instead of banana and watch as they’re devoured by friends and family. There are more practical uses, too, of course: dietary restrictions, kid preferences, seasonal availability… They’re all reasons we tweak recipes.
How it works:
To Taste was designed to be beautiful and simple: visually pleasing but made to stay out of the way of what you’re making and how you’re tweaking. Find a recipe (maybe the grilled pork from chef Neal Fraser; Ali Rosen’s orange, parsley, and walnut salad; Erinn Simon’s chocolate chip saltine blondies; or my orecchiette with cherry tomatoes and burrata), save it to your profile, tweak it, and then either save it as a private draft (so only you can see what makes your signature cookies ridiculous) or post it for others to discover. Follow people who make edits that speak to you. Share your tweaks with your fans (or friends and family).
We’re also on Instagram (@totasteco) and would love to see you and your food there.
Who am I?
I’m Nicole. I’m a writer and editor with a focus on food, travel, and fashion. My whole career has been digital — I started at Huffington Post as the associate editor of the Arts section, I worked for Fodor’s as a digital travel editor, and most recently I was at Ralph Lauren as the women’s style editor. As a writer, I’ve worked for Eater LA, The Line, Wantful, Mr and Mrs Smith, and more. I’ve got a husband and a really cute little boy and an unhealthy obsession with coconut, Aleppo pepper, and olive oil (not all together).
So, welcome to To Taste! I am thrilled, genuinely, that we’re here. I can’t wait to see how we all tweak these recipes, and to see what new tips and tricks emerge from us cooking together.
