HOW TO WRITE A FOOD RECIPE?
Writing a recipe sounds easy enough, but if you’ve ever tried to write one – a good one – you understand how overwhelming the process can be.
Recipe writing for independent food bloggers is a multi-phase process that requires major multitasking. Bloggers not only act as recipe developers and testers, but food writers, editors, food stylists and photographers. And it doesn’t stop there. Marketing and PR can quickly turn into a full time job while trying to drum up coveted clicks to build a loyal following of readers.
While each phase of the food writing process is important, without a decent recipe, all of that multitasking doesn’t mean a thing. A poorly written list of ingredients and instructions can be the downfall of any food blog, and will overshadow beautifully photographed food, endorsements and accolades you may have received in the past.
Aside from the obvious reasons of offering readability, a well written recipe is important for marketing efforts, too. Your recipe is your product, and the more reliable your product, the more loyal your customers (blog followers) will become. With customer loyalty, comes word of mouth, which is one of the best forms of free advertising you can receive.
Once your recipe development and testing is complete, and the photographs have been taken, following tips will help you develop a voice, style and recipe writing template:
Make a template:
Designing a recipe template, before you even dive into recipe writing, will make the process easier and faster. Typically, recipes offer:
• Title
• Head note/description of the recipe
• Yield, cook time
• Ingredients
• Directions/method
• Notes (optional)
Begin by researching other recipes from reputable blogs and food sites. Observe how they divided their recipes into sections and make a list of design attributes that inspired you and what you want to offer your readers.
Don’t get cute with your recipe titles:
Cute doesn’t cut it in the blog world, where real-time search and SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the most important ways people search for and find your content.
For example, if someone is looking for a mint brownie recipe, they will most likely type “mint brownie recipe” into their favorite search engine. The chances of them typing your cute title, “Mr. Grasshopper’s Minty Brownie Surprise Bites,” are pretty slim. Keep titles as clear and precise as possible in order to maximize your SEO potential.
Give them a reason to keep reading:
The head note, or descriptor of your recipe, will establish the voice of your writing and entice readers to go deeper into your recipe and blog. Think about how much you want to share with readers, and if it’s relevant content.
Some blogs present wonderful back stories to recipes, taking readers on a journey and connecting them with the recipe, while others beautifully sum up a recipe in just a sentence or two. Regardless of the long or short format, each successful recipe preamble has one thing in common: it shows with words using the five senses, rather than tells with words that leave the reader with nothing.
Tasty and delicious, for example, may fit nicely into any recipe, but these words only tell, they don’t immerse the reader into the tastes, smells, texture or sounds of a recipe. Instead, ask yourself as you’re writing, “Why is it delicious? What makes it tasty?” Describe the recipe in ways that will make readers want to try your recipe: use briny instead of delicious, cobalt blue instead of pretty.
Keep your descriptions and stories relevant to the recipe. Don’t discuss how your five year old left their dirty socks on your pillow in the same post where a recipe appears, unless it inspired the recipe that follows the story.
Be sure your writing voice fits your audience. Are you writing to or for busy moms, college students, dads learning to cook, or the 30-something professional who longs for culinary school?
Don’t feed your audience empty calories:
Non-words refer to words that appear in a sentence, but don’t really offer value to the story. Words like “actually and really,” fill up space with empty writing calories and, when omitted, will make your writing stronger. For example, “He actually put that really big chocolate covered marshmallow in his mouth,” bores your reader with extra words they don’t need to waste time reading. “He put the big chocolate covered marshmallow in his mouth,” is much more precise, but still a little boring. “He shoved the chocolate covered marshmallow into his mouth, scraping the bits of brittle chocolate that clung to his lower lip with his two front teeth,” is a more powerful sentence.
Be specific about ingredients:
As writers, we sometimes assume that people know what we’re thinking; as if readers are already in our heads. Because of this, we tend to skip over important details in recipes, guessing the reader already knows what kind of butter or what type of salt to use. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. For the “don’t” readers, guessing what kind of salt or butter to use can make or break a recipe, so be specific.
Different salts, for example, have different sized crystal structures and are not interchangeable in most recipes. Kosher salt has a much larger and more irregularly shaped crystal than table salt, and requires more to equal the same results of table salt. Mix the two up in a recipe, and it may be too salty or not salty enough.
Tell the reader exactly what you want them to use: what kind of oil (vegetable, canola, olive, etc.), what kind of vinegar (balsamic, red wine, rice wine), what kind of oregano (dried or fresh).
The most common way to list ingredients is to list them in the order they are used. For recipes that have multiple parts, like a pie (pie dough, pie filling, egg wash), list all of the ingredients for each section together, breaking them up into categories. For example, if you’re writing a recipe for blueberry pie, your ingredients and directions might look something like this:
Ingredients:
For the dough –
For the filling –
For the egg wash –
Directions:
Make the dough –
Make the filling –
Make the egg wash –
Say what you mean:
The way you word measurements in your list of ingredients is important. One cup of chopped parsley is not the same thing as one cup of parsley, chopped. Think about where the word “chopped” is placed in the sentence:
One cup of chopped parsley means that you’ve CHOPPED the parsley BEFORE you measured it.
One cup of parsley, chopped, means that you’ve MEASURED the parsley BEFORE you chopped it.
The two descriptions will yield completely different amounts, so be sure you’re using the correct placement of your verbs and adjectives.
Recipe directions, the how-to of how-to’s:
Cooking directions (or method as it’s often referred to in the professional industry), should be as specific as possible, but not too wordy; wordy directions can seem overwhelming to readers at first glance.
Many recipe writers use short, incomplete sentences to keep the word count down to a minimum. For example, “Place the macaroni in the boiling water and stir so it doesn’t stick to each other in the pot,” can be cut down to, “Boil macaroni, stir to prevent sticking.”
The directions should also follow the order of ingredients. If the ingredient list states tomatoes, garlic, oil, oregano, the directions should list those ingredients in the same order, “Add tomatoes, garlic, oil and oregano.”
Graphic design – if they can’t read it, they’ll never come back:
The design of your recipe is just as important as how it’s written – if visitors can’t read it, they won’t print it, save it or ever make the recipe again.
You don’t have to have a degree in graphic design in order to make a recipe readable. A safe rule is to always use flush left text, or align left text, which means that all of the text lines up along the left hand margin of your column. Avoid centered paragraphs of text where every sentence is centered on the page or within a paragraph, which is difficult to read. Justified text, unless you’re a newspaper trying to cram as much text into a small space as you can, should also be avoided.
Keep your font colors readable as well, avoiding light fonts on a dark background, which can create a nightmare for readers trying to print recipes.
Recipe writing resources:
The more you develop and write recipes, the easier the process will become. You’ll also become a better writer by consistently following your template, and watching for non-words in your sentence structure.
Resource: http://foodblogforum.com/1058-how-to-write-recipes-that-people-will-read-eat-and-brag-about
Posts
