Where do the recipes come from?

Question: What is Epicurious.com?

Tanya Steel: Epicurious.com is, I think, probably the best food web site out there. It’s got more awards than any other web site. I will tout it for that. And it’s comprised of 60,000 recipes – 25,000 of which are from some of the best food magazines in the business – Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines – as well as thousands of recipes from cookbook authors and chefs from around the world. It also has 35,000 recipes from our members.

And people from around the world have input their own recipes into our database, and people can rate and review those recipes and comment on them. And it’s an amazing community that’s been fostered at Epicurious. So it’s actually one of the first social networking sites that was out there, because it was really one of the first sites where you could talk about food, rate food, review it, be your own critic.

The criticism from the community, the pans, the raves – all that added a real editorial layer to the site that a site had never been created before like that. So it’s very unique in that . . . in that way. It also has a really rich layer of editorial authoritative guides. So every holiday from Lunar New Year through Christmas Day we’ve got you covered – menus, recipes. We do amazing technique videos. So for people who don’t know how to cook, or how to cook an egg, or even pop open a champagne bottle, we’ve got everything you would need to know about doing all of those things from the very simple to the very complicated.

So we really try to just talk about food for people who love to eat and embrace food. And we don’t try to preach to them. We try to talk to people who don’t know how to cook as well as to people who really love to cook. So we’re talking to a lot of different audiences.

January 17, 2008