Ernst Fressalien
September 26, 2023 9:03 AM Subscribe
What are the international equivalents of Serious Eats?
You are a home cook with a high degree of skill in a non-US country. You are looking to improve your technique, maybe learn some new recipes for cuisine that is common to your country. You want writing that is backed up by research, either through testing of methods or referrals to authoritative sources. What website are you going to?
You are a home cook with a high degree of skill in a non-US country. You are looking to improve your technique, maybe learn some new recipes for cuisine that is common to your country. You want writing that is backed up by research, either through testing of methods or referrals to authoritative sources. What website are you going to?
This is probably something the US does best because of economy of scale. If just 2% of US home cooks and 0.1 % of English speaking cooks all over the world use Serious Eats for ideas and recipes, that is millions and millions of people, so they have the ad-revenue, and thus the time to do the work.
If a similar site here had 2% of home cooks, they would have less than 100.000 viewers. And everyone speaks English so will often choose an English-language site instead. There are some commercial sites, like Arla, and Dr. Oetker that have pretty reliable recipes in most European countries, and there are some very solid bloggers that I sometimes look to for very local recipes. But none of them describes the research and proces the way Serious Eats does.
This Italian site seems to have great recipes, and I get it often when I search for recipes. They describe the cooking process very well, though not the background research so much.
posted by mumimor at 9:58 AM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
If a similar site here had 2% of home cooks, they would have less than 100.000 viewers. And everyone speaks English so will often choose an English-language site instead. There are some commercial sites, like Arla, and Dr. Oetker that have pretty reliable recipes in most European countries, and there are some very solid bloggers that I sometimes look to for very local recipes. But none of them describes the research and proces the way Serious Eats does.
This Italian site seems to have great recipes, and I get it often when I search for recipes. They describe the cooking process very well, though not the background research so much.
posted by mumimor at 9:58 AM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
In addition to what’s been said above about the economics and scale not working as well in some other languages, I would just say that even Serious Eats is not exactly what it once was in terms of depth and scale. So ultimately I’m not sure it even works for them anymore.
They do benefit from having their back catalog of stuff, though.
posted by fruitslinger at 3:33 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
They do benefit from having their back catalog of stuff, though.
posted by fruitslinger at 3:33 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
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As best I can tell, the closest equivalent would be Stiftung Warentest's recipes site. Stiftung Warentest is a bit like Consumer Reports in the US. In addition to the recipe site they publish a series of cookbooks that are essentially German translations of America's Test Kitchen's books.
For what it's worth, someone asked basically this same question on Reddit in 2020, about a German equivalent of Serious Eats, and got nothing. Well, they got recommendations for chefkoch.de, but it doesn't have the same "we tried 30 variations of this cookie recipe" approach that Serious Eats, Cook's Illustrated, etc do. It's mostly a user-submitted recipe site, similar to allrecipes.com
posted by jedicus at 5:44 AM on September 27, 2023