Too many cooks in the online kitchen?

When I got married one of the gifts that I treasured most was a small wooden filing box. Inside was a series of note cards with printed recipes — favorites of the women who had attended one of my wife’s showers. These recipes represented their go-to dishes, the ones they would want to be known for serving.

And now that trend is slowly moving online as people are pooling and critiquing recipes via the process of crowd-sourcing. The concept is that recipes will ideally be refined over time as people tweak, add or eliminate ingredients. The challenge lies in amalgamating people’s tastes and assuming that all contributors are hoping your dinner is a success.

Online recipe repositories like Foodista are attracting both contributors and investors (like Amazon.com), who are altruistically looking to create the definitive guide for recipes, cooking techniques, kitchen utensils and ingredients.

Foodista and Recipes Wiki raise the issue if a scientific approach can be successful when it comes to cooking. While exact measurements are essential to successful baking, the joy of cooking lies in unhappy accidents and a bit of improvisation. Although I suppose this could just be the natural evolution of handing down recipes — just to the entire Internet rather than a newly married couple.  

And yet as enthusiastic as I was to receive all that collective wisdom, I have to confess I haven’t made a single dish from the collection. Instead, I’ve learned via trial-and-error and through the cookbooks we’ve amassed over the years. And considering that I haven’t turned to those homemade recipes, why would I put a lot of stock in a group-authored dish?
 
[Image via Flickr: nadya peek]