The 5 Best Online Recipe Resources

With all the noise online these days, it's tough to know who you can trust when it comes to recipes that work. There are few things more frustrating than searching for a recipe, shopping for the ingredients, and putting the time and effort into making it, only to discover that it doesn't deliver as promised. As a professional recipe developer, it's my business to know the (mostly) friendly competition. Here are the online sources you can count on for consistently great recipes and ideas.

Here are a few of the online recipe resources I repeatedly turn to for ideas, inspiration, and recipes that I know will deliver as promised.

1. Good Eats' Website
For ten years, Alton Brown's been delivering offbeat jokes, silly costumes, serious kitchen geek-talks, and the most innovative recipes on the planet. You can catch all of it here, along with a boatload of video tips and tricks. Whether it's cooking chili in a pressure cooker, shrimp and instant noodles in a foil pouch, or prime rib in a flower pot, his recipes are a constant workout for the brain, and the palate.

2. Cook's Illustrated 
Why pay for recipes when you can get them for free? Because with an army of test cooks refining each recipe 30,40, even 50 times, Cook's Illustrated is the only source for guaranteed 100% foolproof recipes. Their specialty lies in traditional American fare (think mac & cheese, meatloaf, and roast chicken a dozen different ways), but they've also got a flair for reinventing classic ethnic dishes using nothing but standard supermarket staples. It's $14.95 for a yearly online subscription (which includes unlimited access to recipes, equipment reviews, and helpful video demonstrations), but that's a small price to pay to never ever flub a meal again.

3. Food52 

Take the user-generated content concept of a wiki, give it a couple curators with more than a bit of culinary know-how (try Amanda Hesser of the NY Times and former Cook's Illustrated test cook Merrill Stubbs), and you've got Food52, the first online recipe resource with a truly bottom-up approach. Even the most creative of professional recipe developers is no match for the combined brainstorming power of an entire online community of cooks. So when, for example, Amanda calls on all cooks to come up with the best recipes that involve lemon, thyme, and a grill, you end up with gems like Grilled Peaches with Lemon Thyme Mascarpone and Pistachios, or Grilled Bread with Thyme Pesto and Preserved Lemon Cream. Whatever the season, you're guaranteed to find inspiration within the masses.

4. Online Conversion 
Any good baker knows that to get good, consistent results, measurements should always be made in weight, not in volume, which means that after a bowl, a mixing spoon, and a scale, a calculator is a baker's best friend. There are several good online cooking conversion calculators, but the one from Online Conversion dot com is the best. With the option to convert any weight or volume of scores of pre-entered ingredients to any other unit of measurement, it's the only resource you need to convert any recipe from cups and tablespoons to pounds and ounces, kilos and grams, and any measurement in between. So next time you wonder how many ounces of crushed Oreos fit into a 1 cubic foot box, the answer is right at your fingertips (that's 509.4 ounces, in case you were wondering).

5. YouTube 
Remember back when the best things on YouTube were weird self-produced music videos and home movies of animals peeing in funny places? Well don't worry--you can still find all of that stuff there. But when it comes to finding decent video demonstrations of recipes or kitchen techniques, it's often your best bet just by sheer factor of volume. I find that for ethnic recipes in particular, it is by far the best resource for authentic recipes, often coming direct from the source--home cooks and professionals in their mother country. Like all online searching, you have to do some major culling to get at what's best, but what I wouldn't cull for some good green curry!

What's your go-to online recipe resource?

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