Food52’s New App Wants Us to Move Beyond The Recipe

In today’s interconnected world, there are more and more ways to decide what’s for dinner (or lunch, or breakfast, or brunch, or a midnight snack, or…you get the idea). There are brick-and-mortar bookstores riddled with cookbooks from seemingly every popular restaurant or bakery, not to mention every food network star and popular blogger. It’s also easier than ever to Google a dish and find countless recipes for it, each with a rating, time estimate, detailed instructions and lengthy comments section. Or you can subscribe to one of the many meal kit companies like Blue Apron, and have the ingredients delivered to your door along with the recipe.

While we love the exchange of ideas and inspiration that happens across all these channels, there are times it can be a bit overwhelming – and doesn’t necessarily reflect the way we cook on a daily basis. The app (Not)Recipes, released by Food52 last week, acknowledges this divide, and aims to bring us a new way of sharing food inspiration. (Not)Recipes is a sharing platform for images and short descriptions dishes, of the sort that you might email to a friend to let her know how to make those cookies you’ve been whipping up forever. The pictures themselves are beautiful, with filters inspired by famous chefs from different eras, and a simple hashtag system makes them all easy to search. Just don’t call it the “Instagram of” anything – users can’t follow their friends or favorite chefs, and that’s by design. Cofounder Amanda Hesser explains that they “wanted to get the message [out] that this really is about the cooking, and the social element will follow. It’s not a popularity contest.”

We still recommend hanging on to all your favorite cookbooks (we certainly will be), but consider adding (Not)Recipes to your rotation for some easy weekday inspiration. To read more, click here.