Teresa <3 i am always inspired and reassured, by the way you consciously engage in repotting your labour/rooting it where is "verdant" instead of virtual. i like to believe that kind of kinetic arc has the most stamina, and hence longevity... so thankful for your friendship, and (selfishly) excited for more essays from someone whose written and culinary (+ floral-on-culinary) compositions never fail to simultaneously astound and nourish!! love you deeply
I hugely enjoyed reading this - so well-written and as someone who loves developing recipes but does it alongside a busy dayjob and taking care of a toddler I definitely struggle with the pace others can maintain. But I also think there is value in slowing down - both for your personal sanity but also for the quality of the recipes you are working on. Yes you can force recipe testing in a mechanical way but I also think the best recipes develop a (long) life of their own - they come together over time, after many trials and tribulations, some unforeseen detours, many tweaks and sometimes end up something entirely different from the idea you started with etc. And that doesn’t magically happen in a 2 week cycle.
You are such a wonderful writer. I found what you wrote so interesting. I’m frequently buying cookbooks and finding new recipes online and in magazines(I’m old fashioned). Knowing what is going on behind the scenes of all these recipes is something that I’m always curious about.
I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about this topic, mostly from the perspective of a reader/consumer and an avid home baker with no professional experience; thanks so much for so eloquently sharing the creator experience and challenges in this era. I am probably of your age cohort, I remember the first PC we got when I was a kid, and the many phases of dial up, and in high school and college, I remember discovering food network and recipe sites (like allrecipes) and the world of food blogs. I, too, amateur blogged for awhile (it’s still around but I haven’t posted in years), mostly to catalog my baking adventures for reference for myself, and family and friends if they enjoyed the recipe. I saw the rise of bloggers who made the jump into full time content creation, but I didn’t really get into social media until the pandemic, so missed on most of the content creator acceleration/frenzy on those platforms in the 2010s, but now I follow a bunch of people on Substack, and over a hundred blogs still on Feedly (old school RSS reader), and follow a lot of the same people on IG. I’ve supported people on Patreon as well. I subscribed to cooks illustrated for a number of years, cancelled it when I started supporting individual creators online. I’ll echo the sentiment from your exchange with commenter Kennedy: as a reader/consumer, it is also exhausting to keep up with a neck breaking pace of recipes in the name of supporting the livelihood of my favorite creators. Mostly I am a recipe hoarder- I don’t use 99.9% of the recipes I save from the internet, or pay for as a subscriber (I Iike to joke that my superpower is hoarding recipes and being able to find good recipes for anything anyone asks me about). And I understand that in the social media world, income is generated on number of views, ad content, etc, so more content is definitely rewarded, but translating that pace over to a reader-supported model like patreon or Substack doesn’t necessarily slow people’s expectations (maybe this is a problem for both sides). I love trying new recipes, it’s how I got my experience that I can draw upon now to whip things up in my free time with high success rate, and I wish I had more time and energy to bake new things like I did when I was younger. While my family has confidence in my baking skills and loves to eat what I bake, we are a small family with limited appetite, and we don’t eat enough to merit a revolving door of new-to-us recipes, so often I fall back on tried and true favorites, which then somewhat defeats the purpose of consuming new content. There’s a paradox of constantly trying new recipes to find favorites but then once you find the one you want to keep enjoying, you have less bandwidth to make new recipes. I get a reality check from my husband, who always tells me he can’t tell the difference between very similar recipes I’ve made (for example, for chocolate chip cookies), and definitely refuses to call a favorite, so while I have a ton of chocolate chip cookie recipes I’ve tried over the years, no one can tell me which one they remember preferring, because they’re all great. So if I’m not able to use all the content created, why do I follow so many creators? My answer: Education, new-to-me recipes, and for the pure love of reading food writing. I’m an “old school food blog reader” and I still really love reading the stories and headnotes about your connection with the recipe (I know I’m a dinosaur). I certainly love being able to reach out to the content creator and have what could be qualified as an “Internet friendship” (yes I know its complicated by the fact there’s a business aspect to the relationship and also parasocial). And maybe I feel some sense of responsibility and guilt to make sure I support and engage to help keep people I admire afloat so they can keep doing what they love (meanwhile they start to burn out from the hustle culture). It’s a weird place right now where I think there’s a vicious cycle and both sides maybe a bit exhausted? I feel like I am as a reader too.
So back to what you’re talking about. Ultimately, in some ways, you’re selling cult of personality to get people to support by paid subscription. In this day and age of deciding to make your own way in content creation, maybe you have to do more at first to establish expertise and get some notoriety (for you, your bakery helps since you have local customers and press), but if you have a sense you have a community gathered around you who see you as a valued source of expertise, storytelling, recipes etc. and they’ve demonstrated that by paid subs, I personally think that you should do whatever the hell you want. They’re here for *you*, not the number of recipes you can churn out on a regular basis, but to support your work in general and for the privilege for access to your treasured family recipes and meticulously developed new ones. I guarantee most readers cannot make them all at any regular pace (if they do, good for them), but probably enjoy reading about it either way. So you should do what you feel comfortable with to keep your own motivation and passion alive. Ok sorry this is so long, but I feel for you and other OG content creators so much in this increasingly-saturated field (and cookbook creators too, which is a related but also different discussion), and I’m not sure if I am a bit out of step with what a lot of people want from creators, but I hope overall the pendulum is swinging to some middle ground where people have a sustainable way of being supported to create quality content and curate educational things for their audience without losing themselves or their mental health in the process, and we readers benefit from your experience and worldview, we can all connect virtually in our mutual love of food and baking. Thanks for reading if you made it this far! 😆
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!! I appreciate and value the reader’s POV a bunch. I’m actually feeling less motivated by accumulating paid subscriptions lately, although of COURSE they help and are welcome. I’m fortunate that I stay busy at my bakery and I still take on some freelance recipe work so, I’d really like to build a readership more than anything, at least at this point. Thank you again!
Loved this piece. I think a lot holds true in and outside creative work, almost as if speed of output is being valued more than quality of work (and doing a job isn’t enough, one must write about it prolifically, too). Now to figure out how to push back!
Find a niche, a platform and a marketing model. That's 2024 for you. I like reading now more than watching videos, well maybe 70-30 to reading. There's more connectivity for me than 15 second reels.
Thank you for being real and I hope you find the balance you’re looking for! As a reader, I appreciate knowledge and stories at least as much as the recipes that often accompany them, and you seem like you have a tremendous amount of knowledge and perspective to offer, if the act of writing is more sustainable than constantly coming up with new recipes.
I knew that this piece would echo exactly what I've been thinking (and what a lot of us have been thinking, clearly!) in the past couple of years in regards to sharing recipes. The current state of recipe publication, and content production and intake is so incompatible with how I want to create anything, especially when cooking and consuming food that I make. Thank you for this, Teresa!
I am so glad you are doing this series, and what a fantastic first essay! I am a "I need to know how all of this works before I start" person and a few years ago I started attending workshops and such about starting a blog to jump into food writing - the amount of time put into this work is always amazing to me. I'm so glad you talked about the output speed, as a reader I feel bad if there is a recipe that I'm really interested in but can't make right away for whatever reason.
Tysm for reading!! And for bringing the reader’s perspective🩷. It makes total sense to me that a speedy pace with the recipe output might be overwhelming to the reader as well!
This is a lovely piece to read. I too, am trying to slow down, while moving away from conventional blogging and over to Substack. Trying to find a balance between how much time to spend on recipes and how much time spent on diversifying with additional writing and story telling, is proving tricky.
j/k I LOVED this piece, Teresa, and it is exactly as long as it needed to be. I love thinking about and developing recipes, but the pace and pressure of "content creation" SUCKS, and a lot of recipes remain hidden from the world because I don't have the will to push them to the finish line. (Even ones I make all the time.)
And no, two weeks isn't nearly enough time for a solo cook to develop a recipe for publication, especially when you have other things to attend to at the same time. At ATK we'd spend a *month* on one or two recipes nearly full-time, and we had whole teams of people to taste test and provide feedback all along the way.
I now share recipes-in-progress rather than "final" ones—I rely on feedback from readers to make up for the fact that I am just one person. Most readers are quite tolerant of this, especially when they understand that that's the deal.
So well written! I’m the good cook in my group and a few friends have encouraged me to post recipes on tiktok. I’ve filmed myself making a couple things, and heck, I even started this newsletter originally as a way to share recipes, only to realise how much I hate recipe development. Not all of us have a knack for it like you do, but what really discouraged me is the sheer amount of recipe developers online, people who were pushing out three to FOUR recipes a week. At that point, you wonder if they’re testing them at all or if these are ideas they tried out once or twice and posted online.
I think it’s fun for all of us to share what we eat and like you said, there’s always room for new technique and new flavours, but at a certain point, I started to feel that what a lot of these “hyper productive” recipe developers were putting into the world wasn’t so much a body of work but simply just content that’ll be forgotten next week. We just can’t humanly put up with the scale of production that the algorithm demands from us ...
I’m obsessed with your comment. Thank you for making the distinction between a “body of work” and “content”!! A breakneck speed for recipe development is not sustainable—not for the writers or the readers. Appreciate your thoughts, and you sharing them with me🙏🏻
Teresa <3 i am always inspired and reassured, by the way you consciously engage in repotting your labour/rooting it where is "verdant" instead of virtual. i like to believe that kind of kinetic arc has the most stamina, and hence longevity... so thankful for your friendship, and (selfishly) excited for more essays from someone whose written and culinary (+ floral-on-culinary) compositions never fail to simultaneously astound and nourish!! love you deeply
Lin!!!! Angel😭 thank you for your sweet words as always love u sm
I hugely enjoyed reading this - so well-written and as someone who loves developing recipes but does it alongside a busy dayjob and taking care of a toddler I definitely struggle with the pace others can maintain. But I also think there is value in slowing down - both for your personal sanity but also for the quality of the recipes you are working on. Yes you can force recipe testing in a mechanical way but I also think the best recipes develop a (long) life of their own - they come together over time, after many trials and tribulations, some unforeseen detours, many tweaks and sometimes end up something entirely different from the idea you started with etc. And that doesn’t magically happen in a 2 week cycle.
Thank you so much for reading, Sophia! I’m glad you understand how the nature of recipe development requires time.
You are such a wonderful writer. I found what you wrote so interesting. I’m frequently buying cookbooks and finding new recipes online and in magazines(I’m old fashioned). Knowing what is going on behind the scenes of all these recipes is something that I’m always curious about.
You are too kind! Thank you for reading as always❤️❤️❤️
I have a lot of feelings and thoughts about this topic, mostly from the perspective of a reader/consumer and an avid home baker with no professional experience; thanks so much for so eloquently sharing the creator experience and challenges in this era. I am probably of your age cohort, I remember the first PC we got when I was a kid, and the many phases of dial up, and in high school and college, I remember discovering food network and recipe sites (like allrecipes) and the world of food blogs. I, too, amateur blogged for awhile (it’s still around but I haven’t posted in years), mostly to catalog my baking adventures for reference for myself, and family and friends if they enjoyed the recipe. I saw the rise of bloggers who made the jump into full time content creation, but I didn’t really get into social media until the pandemic, so missed on most of the content creator acceleration/frenzy on those platforms in the 2010s, but now I follow a bunch of people on Substack, and over a hundred blogs still on Feedly (old school RSS reader), and follow a lot of the same people on IG. I’ve supported people on Patreon as well. I subscribed to cooks illustrated for a number of years, cancelled it when I started supporting individual creators online. I’ll echo the sentiment from your exchange with commenter Kennedy: as a reader/consumer, it is also exhausting to keep up with a neck breaking pace of recipes in the name of supporting the livelihood of my favorite creators. Mostly I am a recipe hoarder- I don’t use 99.9% of the recipes I save from the internet, or pay for as a subscriber (I Iike to joke that my superpower is hoarding recipes and being able to find good recipes for anything anyone asks me about). And I understand that in the social media world, income is generated on number of views, ad content, etc, so more content is definitely rewarded, but translating that pace over to a reader-supported model like patreon or Substack doesn’t necessarily slow people’s expectations (maybe this is a problem for both sides). I love trying new recipes, it’s how I got my experience that I can draw upon now to whip things up in my free time with high success rate, and I wish I had more time and energy to bake new things like I did when I was younger. While my family has confidence in my baking skills and loves to eat what I bake, we are a small family with limited appetite, and we don’t eat enough to merit a revolving door of new-to-us recipes, so often I fall back on tried and true favorites, which then somewhat defeats the purpose of consuming new content. There’s a paradox of constantly trying new recipes to find favorites but then once you find the one you want to keep enjoying, you have less bandwidth to make new recipes. I get a reality check from my husband, who always tells me he can’t tell the difference between very similar recipes I’ve made (for example, for chocolate chip cookies), and definitely refuses to call a favorite, so while I have a ton of chocolate chip cookie recipes I’ve tried over the years, no one can tell me which one they remember preferring, because they’re all great. So if I’m not able to use all the content created, why do I follow so many creators? My answer: Education, new-to-me recipes, and for the pure love of reading food writing. I’m an “old school food blog reader” and I still really love reading the stories and headnotes about your connection with the recipe (I know I’m a dinosaur). I certainly love being able to reach out to the content creator and have what could be qualified as an “Internet friendship” (yes I know its complicated by the fact there’s a business aspect to the relationship and also parasocial). And maybe I feel some sense of responsibility and guilt to make sure I support and engage to help keep people I admire afloat so they can keep doing what they love (meanwhile they start to burn out from the hustle culture). It’s a weird place right now where I think there’s a vicious cycle and both sides maybe a bit exhausted? I feel like I am as a reader too.
So back to what you’re talking about. Ultimately, in some ways, you’re selling cult of personality to get people to support by paid subscription. In this day and age of deciding to make your own way in content creation, maybe you have to do more at first to establish expertise and get some notoriety (for you, your bakery helps since you have local customers and press), but if you have a sense you have a community gathered around you who see you as a valued source of expertise, storytelling, recipes etc. and they’ve demonstrated that by paid subs, I personally think that you should do whatever the hell you want. They’re here for *you*, not the number of recipes you can churn out on a regular basis, but to support your work in general and for the privilege for access to your treasured family recipes and meticulously developed new ones. I guarantee most readers cannot make them all at any regular pace (if they do, good for them), but probably enjoy reading about it either way. So you should do what you feel comfortable with to keep your own motivation and passion alive. Ok sorry this is so long, but I feel for you and other OG content creators so much in this increasingly-saturated field (and cookbook creators too, which is a related but also different discussion), and I’m not sure if I am a bit out of step with what a lot of people want from creators, but I hope overall the pendulum is swinging to some middle ground where people have a sustainable way of being supported to create quality content and curate educational things for their audience without losing themselves or their mental health in the process, and we readers benefit from your experience and worldview, we can all connect virtually in our mutual love of food and baking. Thanks for reading if you made it this far! 😆
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!! I appreciate and value the reader’s POV a bunch. I’m actually feeling less motivated by accumulating paid subscriptions lately, although of COURSE they help and are welcome. I’m fortunate that I stay busy at my bakery and I still take on some freelance recipe work so, I’d really like to build a readership more than anything, at least at this point. Thank you again!
Loved this piece. I think a lot holds true in and outside creative work, almost as if speed of output is being valued more than quality of work (and doing a job isn’t enough, one must write about it prolifically, too). Now to figure out how to push back!
Yes! Right there with you. Thank you for reading🙏🏻
Find a niche, a platform and a marketing model. That's 2024 for you. I like reading now more than watching videos, well maybe 70-30 to reading. There's more connectivity for me than 15 second reels.
Thank you for being real and I hope you find the balance you’re looking for! As a reader, I appreciate knowledge and stories at least as much as the recipes that often accompany them, and you seem like you have a tremendous amount of knowledge and perspective to offer, if the act of writing is more sustainable than constantly coming up with new recipes.
Thank you so much for reading, and your thoughtful comment, Sheryl!
I knew that this piece would echo exactly what I've been thinking (and what a lot of us have been thinking, clearly!) in the past couple of years in regards to sharing recipes. The current state of recipe publication, and content production and intake is so incompatible with how I want to create anything, especially when cooking and consuming food that I make. Thank you for this, Teresa!
You said it! It seems like lots of folks in the recipe dev space feel similarly🩷🩷
I am so glad you are doing this series, and what a fantastic first essay! I am a "I need to know how all of this works before I start" person and a few years ago I started attending workshops and such about starting a blog to jump into food writing - the amount of time put into this work is always amazing to me. I'm so glad you talked about the output speed, as a reader I feel bad if there is a recipe that I'm really interested in but can't make right away for whatever reason.
Tysm for reading!! And for bringing the reader’s perspective🩷. It makes total sense to me that a speedy pace with the recipe output might be overwhelming to the reader as well!
This is a lovely piece to read. I too, am trying to slow down, while moving away from conventional blogging and over to Substack. Trying to find a balance between how much time to spend on recipes and how much time spent on diversifying with additional writing and story telling, is proving tricky.
Lynn, thank you for reading! Finding that balance is so important. Our readers will hopefully give us grace as we work it out🙏🏻
TL;DR
j/k I LOVED this piece, Teresa, and it is exactly as long as it needed to be. I love thinking about and developing recipes, but the pace and pressure of "content creation" SUCKS, and a lot of recipes remain hidden from the world because I don't have the will to push them to the finish line. (Even ones I make all the time.)
And no, two weeks isn't nearly enough time for a solo cook to develop a recipe for publication, especially when you have other things to attend to at the same time. At ATK we'd spend a *month* on one or two recipes nearly full-time, and we had whole teams of people to taste test and provide feedback all along the way.
I now share recipes-in-progress rather than "final" ones—I rely on feedback from readers to make up for the fact that I am just one person. Most readers are quite tolerant of this, especially when they understand that that's the deal.
Thank you so much, Andrew🙏🏻 love the idea of sharing an in-process recipe!
So well written! I’m the good cook in my group and a few friends have encouraged me to post recipes on tiktok. I’ve filmed myself making a couple things, and heck, I even started this newsletter originally as a way to share recipes, only to realise how much I hate recipe development. Not all of us have a knack for it like you do, but what really discouraged me is the sheer amount of recipe developers online, people who were pushing out three to FOUR recipes a week. At that point, you wonder if they’re testing them at all or if these are ideas they tried out once or twice and posted online.
I think it’s fun for all of us to share what we eat and like you said, there’s always room for new technique and new flavours, but at a certain point, I started to feel that what a lot of these “hyper productive” recipe developers were putting into the world wasn’t so much a body of work but simply just content that’ll be forgotten next week. We just can’t humanly put up with the scale of production that the algorithm demands from us ...
I’m obsessed with your comment. Thank you for making the distinction between a “body of work” and “content”!! A breakneck speed for recipe development is not sustainable—not for the writers or the readers. Appreciate your thoughts, and you sharing them with me🙏🏻