Food52 founders Amanda Hesser (left) and Merrill Stubbs When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009 they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook. After 52 weeks (hence the name) of online recipe contests, they had the 140 dishes needed for their cookbook, but they also discovered they had inadvertently created a community of passionate home and professional cooks, all willing to share their recipes and their culinary wisdom. Since then Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook. In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web — sort of a Quora or Yahoo Answers for food. The idea is that any time a cook has Read More

Two years ago New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser and her co-founder Merrill Stubbs launched Food52 to collect and test recipes in an effort to crowdsource a cookbook. It took 52 weeks to research and write the cookbook, but another full year before it was published. By the time they finished their second cookbook (yet to be published), they were convinced there had to be a better way. And there it was: the iPad. The pair put together a digital cookbook in a matter of months called the Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, which is now available on iTunes for $9.99. I recently met up with Hesser at a sandwich shop in Manhattan, where she took me through a demo of the iPad app which you can watch in the video above. The cookbook is built on top of Inkling, the digital textbook platform backed by Sequoia. It is Read More