All Recipes Reviews

AllRecipes.com not only boast a fantastically categorized and extensive archive of literally all recipes, they also provide users with some pretty neat tools to get their tasty ideas off their web page and onto your plate! Becoming a member is very easy; just input your Email and choose a username and password and away you go! Although users are required to input a US postcode, international users can easily circumvent this by simply searching ‘US postcodes’ in your search engine and copy and pasting one from here.

Once you have signed up you can instantly begin browsing the recipe archive with access to some great features that we have conveniently listed for you above. In the case that you are sufficiently impressed by All Recipes, upgrading yourself to a supporting membership can cost you less that $1 a month. Supporting members get access to some great additional features which will really help you become the host/hostess with the most/mostess! Please read on as we take you through the essentials of this somewhat substantial features list.

First of all, AllRecipes live up to their namesake by providing you with possibly the largest online collection of recipes in the world. Not only will you find a recipe for pretty much any dish here, including some very obscure concoctions, but you will be able to find it easily due to the excellent categorization, indexing and search tools at your disposal. Each recipe is detailed, complete with photos and complemented by insightful user feedback.

The advanced search engine allows you to narrow down your search according to various criteria that, along with detailed categories, make AllRecipes.com the easiest and quickest place to find a recipe. Furthermore, there are certain categories of recipes which are organized specifically for current seasons or holidays, for example; Garden fresh recipes, Football tailgate recipes and St. Patrick’s Day recipes. We are yet to work our way through every recipe at All Recipes (get back to us in 10 years!), but we can safely say that we were satisfied with every one we tried. It is precisely this combination of a well organized, extensive archive of reliable recipes that has led us to award All Recipes our No. 1 spot.

What makes AllRecipes.com different from simply searching a recipe on Google is that, as well as being assured of the quality, you also have access to some pretty cool tools. For one thing you can save your recipes, which is great for remembering one in particular that worked for you; before long you’ll have a great collection of all your favorite recipes which you can share with your friends by Email or printing them off.

 
  AllRecipes live up to their namesake by providing you with possibly the largest online collection of recipes in the world.  

On the practical side, we really appreciated the shopping list tool which allows you to add any ingredients of a particular recipe you don’t happen to have to your shopping list. In fact, you can use this feature to plan your entire week’s shopping and cooking; no more scratching your head over what to have for dinner tonight, or inspecting a bare fridge and having to opt for takeaway. Again.

For those of us considering an upgrade to supporting member status, the extra features here really are the cherry on the cake. We cook at home, not in a laboratory. Hence, any given recipe must be slightly altered according to your personal preferences and conditions. In this way, recipes are best viewed as guidelines rather than scientific formulas. The option to create your own recipes, or tweak existing ones, makes All Recipes suitable as a resource even for food industry professionals. Advanced printing options then allow supporting members to print out their personalized recipes which can be great for gifts or having to hand in a messy kitchen (not the best place for your laptop!).

Finally, supporting members also get access to special nutrition based recipes which make it especially easy to plan your diet according to a strict nutritional regime; this would be great for nutritionists, athletes, those of us with a health condition or simply looking to lose some pounds. Overall, we would recommend the free membership to the average Joe and the supporting membership to anyone with specific professional or personal culinary needs.

But what good are all these recipes if you don’t know a skillet from a ladle? Well, luckily AllRecipes provide an excellent selection of tools and tips to give you the confidence you need to turn their recipes into your dinner. From e-cookbooks and how-to guides to watch and learn videos, there are loads off great resources to help you not only cook like a pro, but enjoy it to!

We especially liked the user feedback at AllRecipes which gave a real personal touch. You can share stories, hints and tips as well as post questions about any particular dish. For more general cooking discussions, there are e-forums which should answer almost any culinary question you may have.

What makes All Recipes stand out from many of its competitors is that it has managed to attract a critical mass of active users that many other products in this category are still striving for. Although lacking some of the more advanced features of its competitors, this thriving community of foodies is hard to match. Along with the competitions and sweepstakes, we really enjoyed this part of All Recipes.

In conclusion, we are happy to award our number one spot to AllRecipes.com as they have not lost sight of their central tenant; recipes. Furthermore, what they do, they do it well. They may lack some of the flashier features of other sites but with so many excellent quality recipes at such a great price, with some useful features to boot, you can’t go wrong.

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