Face off – Cookbooks vs Culinary Blogs

Welcome Shalini Baisiwala, my guest blogger today. I haven’t met Shalini as yet but have interacted with her regularly over many years. We have connected and shared conversations about food, recipes, travel, nature and environment. She is a passionate advocate for green living and an avid bookreader and traveler.

An interior designer by profession, writing is a passion for her. She is a serious tea & wine guzzler who loves to chase butterflies in her free time.

You could check out her book review writing tips here

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I love food experiments and generally cooking turns into a fad based thing for me. (I mean, besides the daily food that needs to be cooked).  I tend to go overboard with new recipes/food stuffs/ food trends. So for me I find it easier to reach for culinary blogs as opposed to the cookbooks which I feel are fast becoming a thing of yore.

1. Practicality and ease

Cookbooks are expensive, consume space and one can’t buy too many of them. These are also often bulky with glossy pages that get spoilt in the kitchen while cooking. I can jump up and down the blog page far more easily than in a cook book.

Blogs are handier as they can be opened up on the mobile/tab and one can cook side by side with music playing too. I know you can put on music on a player separately with a cookbook, but then to control it you have to wander away from the cooking pot 😉

*It’s pretty quick to research and locate a recipe on the internet and I often look up three different blogs for the same recipe. This helps me to double check a recipe and often I find very useful tips from different cooks.  

2. Step-by-step instructions

In a cookbook, generally, there are just 1-2 pictures of the finished dish and food preparation. But on a blog, one will find step by step instructions, illustrated with step by step pictures which help to gauge how well you are following the instructions for the recipe. It’s far easier to check your mistakes and correct them.

* I find my recipes turn out much better this ways.

3. More Information

It’s easier to put in more information on a blog than in a cookbook. Plus it’s far easier to edit a blog whereas in case of a cookbook, it needs a much more lengthy and expensive process. I love the nutrition info and quantity it makes information that is generally seen more often on the blogs than in the cookbooks.

* This info helps me select the most preferred version of the healthy recipe when I cross check different blogs. Plus I ensure no wastage or excess quantity as I can initially know to halve or double the quantity of ingredients.

4. Sharing the recipe

It’s far easier to share the recipe of what you have successfully made with friends and family when it’s from a blog. Just share the link and that’s it. With a cookbook, you might be dictating/typing it over a phone call/message or sending a picture of the recipe page. But when a blog link is shared, one can also cross through the entire blog to check out other useful recipes.

5. Saving the recipe

Culinary blogs often have a neat printable section of the recipe that one can print and file, if one wishes to in a binder of successfully made recipes. This way only the recipes that worked out for you will be in your records. Or one can simply bookmark the blog page on the computer and save for future reference.

Most of my cookbooks have post-its which have either fallen off or gotten lost inside the book itself over the course of time. Often I forget which recipe from which cookbook and have to hunt through all of them.

So there you have it, my reasons for loving culinary blogs over the traditional cookbooks. But I have to confess I love strewing around the cookbooks on my centre tables and bookshelves as they really look smart 😉

This post is linked with the #GPDec2020 hosted by Shalzmojo every December where a cross posting collaboration is worked out between several bloggers for the entire month. Check out my guest post on their blog Book review Atomic Habits here.