Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food

Useful Tips, Interviews, and Stories to Inspire Food Writers and Bloggers

Recipe Writing

Developing Recipes in the Age of Coronavirus

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Starting image for post on recipe development during the coronavirus.A guest post by Faith Kramer 

Like many food writers ordered to shelter in place, I spend my days developing recipes. I’m doing so for my cooking column, which appears every other week in the j, Northern California’s Jewish Resource. 

Once the quarantine began, it was time to adapt. Overnight we became a nation, if not a world, that wanted comfort food. Taste was still paramount, but I needed recipes that were emotionally nourishing, easy to source, economical and convenient to make, and still connected to my target audience.

Here are my 5 tips for developing recipes in the age of COVID-19:

1. Watch social media to see what people cook and what resources they turn to for recipes and guidance.

Many Facebook groups, Instagram and Twitter hashtags, Pinterest boards, TikTok videos and [Read more…] about Developing Recipes in the Age of Coronavirus

What Makes an Award-Winning Cookbook?

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image for post on award-wining cookookA guest post by Sara Bir

I always tell people the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) awards are to the James Beard Awards what the Golden Globes are to the Oscars. They’re a big deal, a feather in the caps of publishers and authors who produce an award-winning cookbook.

I was a volunteer cookbook judge for the awards. The category I judged had [Read more…] about What Makes an Award-Winning Cookbook?

My 10 Best Blog Posts of the Decade

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image for post on best blog postsThis year I celebrated ten years of blogging, and I wrote about what has changed. Now that it’s the end of the decade, you might also like to read my best blog posts of the last 10 years. 

For me, what defines “best” is all about the engagement. I like posts that [Read more…] about My 10 Best Blog Posts of the Decade

How to Find Inspiration in Recipe Development

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A guest post by Kathryn Pauline 

“Do you ever worry you’ll run out of ideas?” was one of the most stressful things people asked me about blogging when I first started. Now that I’ve been doing recipe development for  years, I have developed over 200 recipes that I love. That anxiety has more or less gone away.

Fortunately, it’s actually pretty easy to set yourself up for creative success with recipe development, and to make sure that your success is meaningful and [Read more…] about How to Find Inspiration in Recipe Development

How I Write High-Performing Recipes for Food52.com

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photo of author of piece on writing high-performing recipes.

A guest post by Emma Laperruque

In the year and a half since I joined the Food52 staff as a writer and recipe developer, I’ve developed over 200 recipes — including some high-performing recipes. Many are for my column, Big Little Recipes, which is all about big flavor and little ingredient lists. The rest are ad hoc for the site. While this number is a small drop in our bucket of almost 50,000 recipes, every one taught me something about how to write a high-performing recipe in the digital age. [Read more…] about How I Write High-Performing Recipes for Food52.com

For Nik Sharma, Developing Recipes is All About Science

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Opening image for post on developing recipes.While a student at the University of Mumbai, studying biochemistry and microbiology, cookbook author and food writer Nik Sharma learned a process that he would eventually use for developing recipes. 

“We worked in a lab, doing medical research, ” he explains. “We were taught to make buffers or chemical solutions. The way it’s done is very similar to [Read more…] about For Nik Sharma, Developing Recipes is All About Science

What I Learned from Cook’s Illustrated about Recipe Development

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image for post on recipe developmentA guest post by Christine Gallary

I live and breathe recipe development all day long, creating them in my home kitchen for clients or working on other people’s recipes. I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve edited thousands of recipes.

I owe this recipe development career of mine, which I absolutely love and adore, to my stint at Cook’s Illustrated (CI) over 10 years ago. It was the best bootcamp experience ever on learning how to develop good, solid, replicable recipes. I started out as a naive intern who had just graduated from culinary school, but soon, recipe development became my full-time profession. [Read more…] about What I Learned from Cook’s Illustrated about Recipe Development