Recipe Sleuths *Heart* Emo Searches

Posted by The Editorial Desk / Monday, October 19th, 2009

Was a time when folks marched into the kitchen solely because they were feeling “hungry.”

How very Cro-Magnon.

These days, professional chefs and home cooks are plumbing the depths of human emotion for culinary inspiration.

Even Top Chef has gotten in on the emo-cooking act:

(Video: The Daily Beast)

As part of the show’s October 7 “Quickfire Challenge,” the cheftestants were tasked with creating a dish dictated by a Mad Libs-like construct of randomly generated moods, tastes and cuisines plucked from the Cookstr search engine.

Cookstr editor-in-chief Katie Workman was, naturally, thrilled to have the fledgling site featured on the epicurean eyeball magnet that is Top Chef. “It was definitely a great traffic bump for us,” Workman said of the high profile vetting of their “mood” search feature.

Workman said Cookstr, which turns one this November, has flourished in large part because of its “nontraditional, intuitive” search tags.

“We tried to get into the mind of the home cook … [and] mood was one of them” she said of the founders’ desire to shake up the status quo of ingredient-driven cooking.

Cookthink co-founder Brys Stephens said the concept of mood-oriented cooking weighed heavily on his group’s mind as well–hence the reason they cemented the qualifier as one of their core search criteria and seeded the category with dozens of attitude capturing keywords (personal favorites include: “hangover-friendly,” “mind-boggling” and “junky”).

“You don’t see words like the one’s we have in other searches,” Stephens stated. “I think that’s what people love about Cookthink.”

Stephens suggested that, at least for now, Cookthink has no plans to broaden its “mood” chasing efforts (he estimated that roughly 95 percent of Cookthink’s “mood” search tags have been in place since the site launched in summer 2007).

Not so at Cookstr, where Workman said her team stands poised to unveil more interactive search features as well as torrents of culinary content (they’ve currently got 4,500 recipes online, with another 10,000 “in the pipeline,” she asserted) in the near future. “It’s pretty exciting,” she said.

–Warren

Tags: Brys Stephens, cooking, Cookstr, Cookthink, feelings, food, Gut Check, Katie Workman, Northern Virginia Magazine, recipe, Top Chef, Warren Rojas