Reviews of The 5 Biggest & Most Popular Recipe Websites - Allrecipes, Cooks Illustrated, Food Network, Cooks.com & Epicurious
Five Best Recipe Websites
I have a shelf full of good cookbooks gathering dust because it is so much easier to look up a good recipe online. But if you do a Google search for Pad Thai or Buttermilk Biscuits, you’ll find hundreds of recipes. Which one to use?
This list of the best recipe websites (and a couple of popular but lousy sites) should help you find the right instructions for making a great dinner.
1. Allrecipes
I think Allrecipes is the best recipe website for the average home cook, with recipes ranging from simple to gourmet, and a great rating system to separate the Filet Mignon from the Spam, so to speak.
This Seattle-based recipe website lists thousands of user-submitted and professional recipes. I found 169 recipes containing lentils using the site’s ingredient search.
The ingredient search function is one reason this is the best recipe website. You can list up to four desired ingredients AND four ingredients you don’t want. You can also add another keyword (such as soup or breakfast) or search within specific recipe collections. It’s great for using up random fresh vegetables and other ingredients when you can’t get to the grocery store.
If you want to use asparagus and potatoes but don’t have any chicken or beef in the house, you can browse the six recipes that meet these specific criteria. You can view the list by rating or limit them to recipes with photos, so you know what your meal should look like.
Like Amazon.com (and most of these recipe websites), each recipe also lists an overall average rating out of five stars and the number of reviews. The reviews also can be useful in finding suggestions for improvements or substitutions (though my pet peeve is recipe reviewers who substitute half the ingredients, then give a lousy rating).
You can register for the recipe website for free, and members can save recipes, write notes about them and even add all the ingredients to a personalized shopping list.
2. Cooks Illustrated
If you don’t mind paying an annual fee, Cooks Illustrated is probably the best recipe website for serious cooks who eat at home nearly every night and don’t want to mess around with experimental user-submitted recipes.
You can’t go wrong with the recipes on this website. They have all been tested in America’s Test Kitchen, a famous cooking laboratory in Boston that employs cooks and testers to experiment with the ideal ingredients, temperatures and more for each recipe.
The result may be one variety of lentil soup instead of 30 risky user-submitted variations, but you can be sure the lentil soup is foolproof and tasty. My lentil search only brought up eight lentil recipes (and two other articles about choosing and cooking lentils).
Of course, somebody has to pay for all the testing, so the recipe website costs $34.95 per year, but you can try it first with a free 14-day trial.
3. Food Network
The Food Network is the online version of the cable’s porn network for foodies. Each recipe is connected with a show on the network, which can help narrow your choices. For example, I find Rachel Ray’s cooking too fatty and her recipes too vague and conversational. No problem. That just means I can ignore her recipes and focus on the others.
The content on the recipe website is pretty vast. My lentil search pulled up 160 recipes. The site has the standard ratings system, but you have to click to a separate page to see the ratings.
You can’t search for multiple ingredients or unwanted ingredients, and you can’t scale recipes to your needed quantities, a great tool on Allrecipes and other sites. You can list recipes according to difficulty, rating or preparation time. You can also filter recipes by type, cuisine, chef and even technique. Handy stuff.
My biggest problem with the site is the design. There are so many ads, links and other clutter, the recipe gets lost in a pretty narrow strip in the middle of the page. Even the print versions of recipes, which should be simple and plain, have ads. Fail.
4. Epicurious
This recipe website compiles vast numbers of recipes from Gourmet, Bon Appetit and other upscale food magazines, as well as cookbooks. It is aimed at gourmet chefs. I personally don’t have the budget or patience for many of these recipes, but it’s probably the best recipe website if you really want to impress the in-laws.
The recipes have the prestige of already being published in respected magazines, but they are too often experimental nouvelle cuisine recipes. The comments, which are similar in format to Allrecipes, often describe the food as “interesting” but not so tasty.
The lentil search brought up 155 recipes, nearly as many as Allrecipes, but instead of simple soups and stews, the top ideas are Salmon with Lentils and Mustard-Herb Butter or Spiced Pork with Celery Root Purée and Lentils, each calling for unusual, rare ingredients. I just want to make dinner. I’m not interested in foraging for celery roots or pureeing them, for that matter.
The one advantage of the Epicurious recipe website is the search refinement function, which is even better than the Food Network site. You can limit your 155 lentil recipes by main ingredient, cuisine, season, various dietary considerations and more.
5. Cooks.com
Google loves this site. I do not. It’s certainly not one of the best recipe websites, but it almost always pops up on search engines. The site has lots of recipes, maybe more than any other site, but none of the added perks listed for the other sites.
There are no ratings, leaving no way of comparing the quality of these user-submitted recipes. There is also no way to limit searches by cuisine, dietary limits, etc. If you search for a recipe, cooks.com may well be your first result. Skip to #2.