Take your go-to recipe from favorite to famous!
Chances are you’re reading this because you enjoy cooking and sharing food with others. Posting one of your own recipes on Allrecipes is a great way to share your creations with a much larger crowd!
Whether you improvise your way around the kitchen, tend to tweak ingredients to get the tastiest result, or follow steps methodically, a recipe is the common starting point. We get thousands of recipe submissions every year. Here are 5 tips to help your recipe stand out from the crowd and get published to the site for everyone to find, try, and review!
Title
Choose a clear title that tells the cook what to expect and includes search-friendly words. “Andouille and Chicken Creole Pasta” tells us more about the dish than “Mardi Gras Pasta.” Since other cooks often search by ingredient, “Andouille and Chicken Creole Pasta” is more likely to pop up.
Description
A short but detailed sentence describing the dish will get the cook excited and tell him/her what to expect. Check out the description for Addictive Asian Beef Slaw, for example: “This meal has it all – beef, shredded veggies, soy sauce, hot sauce, and lots of fresh cilantro. This dish is truly addictive.” NIMITZ’s description for Thai Peanut Chicken includes an extra tip about spiciness: “This is a very tasty Asian-inspired dish made with chicken and broccoli in a spicy peanut sauce. If you like it mild, use less cayenne, like it spicy, use more. If you’re salt conscious, use low-sodium soy sauce.” To help your recipe editor, please stick to basic characters and skip the symbols: We can’t use italic or bold type, or symbols like ampersands or emoji.
Ingredients
For other cooks to get the same result you did, it’s helpful for ingredients to be as exact and descriptive as possible. Instead of “cheese, parsley to taste, and garlic,” write “1 cup Cheddar cheese, 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley, or to taste, and 1 clove garlic, crushed.”
List the ingredients in the order they are used in the recipe. If you are making a salad with a homemade salad dressing, list the salad dressing ingredients first and the salad ingredients after that. Check out Balanced Babe’s Kale, Carrot, and Sunflower Seed Salad as an example.
List ingredients like fruits, vegetables, and cheese in the form your recipe calls for. If a recipe requires chopped onion, shredded Cheddar cheese, and diced avocado, write that out in the ingredient list (like heathg did in this Breakfast Pita Pizza) rather than telling the cook to chop, shred, and dice in the steps.
Steps
Write out each step and be as thorough and descriptive as possible, using every ingredient that is listed. Instead of “mix everything together and bake,” write “preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a baking dish. Mix flour, milk, eggs, and sugar together in a bowl until batter is smooth; pour into the baking dish. Bake in the preheated oven until a toothpick inserted in the center comes about clean, about 30 minutes.” Cindy’s detailed, step-by-step directions for her Italian Lemon Cream Cake have earned it 5 stars.
Time
Always add a prep and cook time when submitting your recipe. If your recipe doesn’t require cooking, put a zero in the cook time section.
If you have any questions, contact us at customerrelations@allrecipes.com
