The Food Network has always had a built-in recipe manager on their website, FoodNetwork.com. They are expanding that capability into a stand-alone website that is currently in Beta (Beta means that software has now moved into a public viewing and usage stage, but not fully released). Welcome to Food.com.

Food.com is a clean looking site that isn’t ridden with tons of ads like their parent site at FoodNetwork.com. I’m hoping that when the site is finally released, it will keep it’s clean look. At this time the system allows for recipe searches within the Food Network databases but ALSO accesses recipes from:

Recipezaar
Epicurious
Better Homes & Gardens
Martha Stewart
Blueprint
Bon Appétit
Chow
Coastal Living
Cookie
Cooking Light
Eating Well and SO much more!

Think of Food.com as the ultimate recipe database tapping recipe sites from all over. A search is fairly simple. Enter your search in the field and click on search. You can refine your search by course, cuisine, ingredient, method, recipe database, diet or time. For example my search for “chocolate” yeilded over 3500 recipes. I could reduce my search by restricting it to only recipes from Southern Living magazine (which reduced it to a search of 180) and recipes that used a blender (which reduced it down to 3)…you get the idea!

Any recipe can be added to your Recipe Box. You can either click on the Add to Recipe Box button or drag the recipe to the recipe box icon at the bottom of the page. Once in your recipe box you can view your contents in either Simplified or Expanded view. Each view gives tells you the name, where the recipe is from, total cooking time, rating and type of cuisine.

But there is much more than just accessing the 1000’s of recipes on the internet. You can also upload your own recipes which can be shared with the public or kept private for use just in your recipe box. Uploading a recipe is very easy. Enter a name, prep and cook time, how many servings and choose a difficulty rating. From there you can enter in Ingredients and any special equipment needs for your recipe.

They have taken into account almost every type of measurement from a “pinch” to a “dash” to a “sprig”.  Next you can enter the step-by-step cooking instructions. Once that part is done, enter any additional notes for the recipe then you need to categorize your recipe. You can categorize using any number of criteria. To finish it off, upload a photo to show off your creation and then determine if you want the world to see your recipe or only for you eyes only. At this time, they only allow for just one photo upload.

I look forward to future features like the ability to upload recipes from sites that Food.com doesn’t currently use. They are also about to release a toolbar for IE6, IE7 and Firefox to give you capability to add recipes and links to your recipe box.

On a final note, Food.com also gives you a history of your visits which I think is a nice touch. Go check out Food.com now and enjoy!