IS Magazine Blog

Best of the Blogs: The Top 5 Food Blogs

Jul 18 2011

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What makes a food blog stand out? Is it the clean layout, cool graphics or frequent updates? While all those elements are crucial for any food blog, they are not enough to sustain and maintain interest in the long run among readers.

The top 5 food blogs we are featuring today have all those things and a lot more. A steady supply of easy recipes with easy to find ingredients, beautifully photographed pictures, and well written descriptions of the foods are sure to entice readers from coming back, aside from the elements mentioned above.

Intimacy, also very crucial aspect, which is quite frankly, often overlooked in most food blogs today. You must always make the reader feel as if you are talking to him in person to build a sense of connection and rapport with your target readers.  Lastly, you must have passion for what you are doing and when in doubt, always keep it simple.

Herewith, the top 5 food blogs:

1. Simply Recipes

Highlighted as one of the “Eight of the Very Best Food Bloggers” in 2010 by no less than magazine giant Forbes, Elise Bauer has a lot to be proud of as the creator of this wonderful food blog.

A Silicon Valley consultant by profession with little cooking skills, Elise started Simply Recipes in 2003 with the aim of documenting her family’s favorite recipes, specifically her parents’ recipes who are both great cooks.

The recipes and foods that are in Simply Recipes are based on the family’s belief that food should always be based on a varied and healthy diet, using real butter, real cream, eggs, lots of green vegetables and protein from meat, fish, cheese and beans. Not to mention the ingredients usually contained in the recipes are easy to find, and the instructions very easy to follow.

Now, Simply Recipes has grown into one of the best food blogs on the net. With praises from Time and Fitness magazine and a huge following of foodies across the globe to boot, Simply Recipes is a validation for Elise’s huge achievement. For someone who didn’t really cook until she was 40, it is a real testament that success can happen at any age.

2. Orangette

Molly Wizenberg realized that she loved writing for food when she dropped out of P.H.D. program in 2003. With nothing better to do, she decided to start a blog at the advice of a friend, and that’s how Orangette got started.

Orangette is the French word for candied orange peels dipped in chocolate, the favorite snack of Wizenberg. While she was thinking of another name for her blog (her first choice for a name was already taken), she saw these sweet treats, and thought orangette would fit perfectly.

Recipes reflect the background of Wizenberg’s simple and unassuming approach that range from the simple, easy to cook snacks to delectable and ambitious. All recipes are described in vivid detail by Wizenberg’s wonderful style of writing. In fact, she even managed to snag a husband through their shared passion of cooking and writing.

It is easy to why Orangette is listed as one of the best food blogs by UK based website TimesOnline.com.

3. Serious Eats

Serious Eats Is a food blog that is seriously great in its enthusiasm to share thoughts about foods, recipes and restaurants for their community of foodies.

With a number of features that keep food lovers coming back for more, Serious Eats is truly one of a kind. Whether you want to get a daily update about the latest food news, entertainment, and commentary or just find the best recipes from a plethora of cookbook writers, chefs and the Serious Eats community, Serious Eats is a food lover’s dream blog. You can even find some honest, trustworthy and reliable eating advice from all over the world in this website.

Still not enough? Why don’t you try browsing some of their affiliated websites like Slice, Hamburger Today and Photograzing. Slice is a blog that focuses on finding the best pizzas around, Hamburger Today from the name itself, is devoted to the one of the most popular fare in the world the hamburger and Photograzing, a place for people to share their best food photography, discover new food blogs, and find delicious inspiration.

Time magazine ranked Serious Eats number seventeen in its list of The 50 Best Websites and two James Beard awards in 2010 for best food blog and Best Video Webcast.

4. The Pioneer Woman

You know you’ve hit the big time when a movie is about to be made that chronicles your life as a food blogger, and that’s just what happened with Ree Drummond of the Pioneer Woman.

A city woman at heart, Ree Drummond was originally planning to become a lawyer before she met Ladd Drummond, her would be husband.  After marrying him they lived on a farm in her hometown to start a family and in 2006 started her blog.

Ree mostly writes about good old country food made with easy to procure ingredients, but what makes her blog a stand out are her musings about her life as the wife of a cowboy in a farm, the activities of her four kids and her husband, “Marlboro Man”, and their animals. This formula proved to be highly popular with readers everywhere: Thirteen million visitors view her website every month.

5. 101 Cook Books

The New York Times featured 101 cookbooks in an article called Food for the People, Whipped Up by the People, regarding great personal food blogs, and Telegraph.co.uk named 101 cookbooks one of the 101 Most Useful Website. But how did creator Heidi Swanson started in this path?

101 cookbooks started on a very interesting premise. Heidi Swanson has accumulated 100 books on cooking that she never really used, so she decided to chronicle all the recipes in those cookbooks one at a time.

Health nuts specially are sure to love 101 cookbooks as Heidi puts a lot of premium on health, and the foods and recipes are primarily focused on natural, whole foods and ingredients.

Since then, Heidi Swanson has decided to expand the blog further, and has now incorporated journals about her travels, her everyday activities and foods that intersect her life.

This is a blog post by Crunchlunch. Looking for Pizza Express Vouchers or Zizzi Vouchers? You have come to the right place!

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