Recipe Collection - How to Monetize?

Wow! Love this. I learned a lot and will re-read this several times. If you don't have a blog, please start one. Please! The combination of in-depth food knowledge and writing expertise is a rare one, and I know I speak for many when I say it enriches life.

I agree wholeheartedly... a picture is worth a thousand words. I think all food sites assume people can always go to YouTube for whatever video they need, and spare themselves the expense of producing it. I don't know what the monetary magic is. When I really want to know something I start with Serious Eats or Cooks Illustrated.

I don't post very often, but when I do, I always stress "read the comments!" because the truth lies in other readers experience. It's amazing how many good sources publish wobbly recipes (wrong quantities for ingredients, missing steps, etc.). The 10 minutes reading comments can save the cook quite a bit of misery.

My grandmother was an Irish immigrant who worked as a kitchen servant for very wealthy American royalty. She was talented and they invested in her by sending her, as one of the first women enrollees, to the Cordon Bleu cooking school in New York City. I learned standing at her side, when she cooked dinner for us on her frequent Sunday visits. It was no fun (I really got a hard smack for everything I did wrong - she did not suffer children gladly), but it was her explaining the science of cooking that fascinated me. And she taught me the art of table setting and proper serving of food. I don't know if I could have learned all that by reading it, no matter how well-written. Everything important I've ever learned, about anything, has been taught to me one-on-one.

Thank you, cv, for your very thoughtful response. I am grateful and will save it to re-read.

Here's another way of looking at this.

Do you have a nice pasta dough recipe? I'm sure you do. I have a few saved up. Do I need another one? No, not really.

However, I'm happy that I have about ten pasta dough recipes from the same guy: Paul Bertolli.

He was one of the longest-tenured chefs at Chez Panisse during the era (Eighties, Nineties) when getting a reservation was very difficult. He co-wrote easily the best cookbook from that restaurant "Chez Panisse Cooking" and finally struck off on his own to open Oliveto Restaurant during which time he wrote "Cooking By Hand" arguably the finest English-language cookbook from the past thirty years. He subsequently left to start Fra'Mani Salumeria.

In "Cooking By Hand" he devotes a chapter to pasta. The first 12 pages describe his philosophy, ingredients, equipment and technique before getting to the first recipe, one for basic pasta. By the time you reach the recipe, you already know that whatever pasta you make won't be as good as what he served at his restaurant because of the twelve introductory pages.

He discovered that to break through his plateau of good pasta versus truly great pasta, he needed to get serious about his ingredients, primarily flour since that's the main ingredient. He ended up milling his own flour at the restaurant, first by hand, later by a mill powered by an electric motor (to not burn out his employees).

That's right, pasta made from a bag of flour that you grab off a supermarket store shelf isn't going to be as good as a pasta made from fresh flour slowly milled from carefully selected wheat.

No standalone pasta dough recipe will tell you this.

He then goes on to include some dish recipes followed by an egg-yolk pasta dough recipe. "This recipes works best for certain dishes." More dishes ideal for that type of pasta. Followed by a recipe for semolina dough for flat pastas. More specific dish recipes. Another recipe for wetter dough for filled pastas (e.g., ravioli). All in all, I think he offers ten pasta dough recipes. And I'm sure he didn't include all of his.

So yeah, having one (or ten) pasta dough recipe(s) is great, but the reasoning behind is far more valuable than just the ingredient list or instructions.

So the question you should ask yourself is "At what point does my pasta dough recipe drown in an ocean of pasta dough recipes?"

The Bertolli cookbook is the antithesis of Food52's current recipe writing philosophy (which is shared by many food sites in 2018). His cookbook has B&W photos of the food preparation process (particularly in the charcuterie chapter) or ingredients. There are zero beauty shots of the final dishes.

Here at Food52, the site has basically abandoned the use of process photography and only publishes beauty shots.

Bertolli's recipes are maniacally precise, particularly the cured meats ones. 0.25 grams of this, 1 gram of that, 7 grams of this, 168 grams of that.

I doubt that he will ever publish a cured meats cookbook. If he did, it would be the most meticulous cookbook of the 21st century appealing to an astronomically small number of American readers who are willing to go to the fanatical lengths that he does.

Anyhow, read the pasta chapter from "Cooking By Hand" and then think whether or not you have anything additional to add to what Bertolli published. I certainly do not.

Your first step should be to consult a copyright attorney based on this following phrase:

"They go back to the 1990s and are all from the best branded cooking sites."

This implies that the content you have collected is someone else's intellectual property. You will need to get permission from them to reproduce their work.

I'm not a lawyer but my basic understanding of copyright is that it protects the original author.

One simply can't redistribute a 25 year old recipe from Cook's Illustrated just because you liked it.

Anyhow, consult a lawyer before you do anything else.

Best of luck.