A different approach to your favourite recipes

Hi, and welcome to Essence of Yum, a new type of recipe blog.

My name’s Brent. I love cooking, and I love trying new recipes. Pinterest is a wonderful place to find them, with hundreds of amateur and professional chefs sharing their favourites for the world to enjoy. Only problem is, there are so many, it’s hard to know where to start! Are they all the same? Similar? What’s different about them? What’s the essence of the dish I’ve searched? I end up with ten new tabs open, and can’t decide which one to choose! I come up against this every time I go looking for a new recipe on Pinterest, so I’ve decided to do something about it.

Once every couple of weeks or so, I’m going to take the time to comb through the recipes I find for particular dishes, but not to decide which one is best, or worst, or my favourite. I’m going to get to the essence of that dish. I’ll figure out what’s consistent amongst the various recipes, what’s different, what stands out and what’s just really interesting. When it’s relevant, I’ll probably do a bit of exploration into origins as well (to help with the whole “authentic” thing). To keep it manageable, I’m going to work with the first twenty unique results that meet a couple of criteria I’ve decided on based on what I have in the fridge, or just what I’m feeling like that day.

I know there must be others facing the same problem, so I’m going to blog what I discover. I’ve created Essence of Yum so that you can hopefully make use of it too. And make sure you let me know what you think. The whole reason for doing this is to learn more about the recipes I explore!

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