25 Top Food Blogs Of 2014
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Like it or not, we're living in The Era of the Blog. In a country where just about everyone has the ability, with the click of a mouse, to post anything he or she wants to on the internet, it seems like everyone with an opinion has taken to a laptop or a tablet and started a blog. This is obviously nothing new (as anyone who used to have a Xanga account can tell you), but the fact that anyone, anywhere, can set up a platform to instantly reach millions of readers (at least potentially) is worth celebrating. For the fifth year running, then, we're ranking the top 25 food-oriented blogs, judged according to readership and social media following.
25 Top Food Blogs of 2014 (Slideshow)
There's plenty of time to argue the merits of what makes a food blog great, be it number of scoops, quality of the recipes, layout, industry usefulness, or wide appeal, but ranking blogs in those terms would be highly subjective. Instead, we've taken an objective approach: we tracked down nearly 250 leading food blogs, using "best-of" lists from sites including Saveur and Babble, then compiled four pieces of data on each one: the average number of monthly visitors for the past year (using Compete.com and Quantcast's data), which counted for 50 percent of each blog's score, and the numbers of Twitter followers, Pinterest followers, and Facebook fans, averaged together for the remaining 50 percent.
There are a few notable differences from last year's list. The Kitchn jumped from #2 into the top spot, and Simply Recipes, which had held down #1 for the past four years, fell down to #4. Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef dropped 14 places while Elana's Pantry jumped nine, and David Lebovitz fell six spots. Recipe Girl also jumped up 16 spots, while Serious Eats made the jump from #7 to #3.
There were also eight newcomers, while others fell off the list entirely. This year we welcome My New Roots, I am a food blog, Dinner: A Love Story, Love and Lemons, Dorie Greenspan, Local Milk, Nourished Kitchen, and The Amateur Gourmet to our list, while we say goodbye to Simple Bites, Joy the Baker, Bakers Royale, Southern Plate, Eater (which, due to its new, expanded format, can't really be classified as a blog anymore), Chocolate and Zucchini, Rasa Malaysia, and Picky Palate. Falling off our list in no way indicates a drop in quality; reasons vary from blog to blog. Some have slowed down the rate of posting entries; others have simply been surpassed by other blogs in traffic.
The blogs on our list offer everything from recipes to reviews to simple musings about life and food, but they're all worthy of your RSS feed if you love to cook and eat. Click here for our list of the 25 top food blogs, and if you think we missed any, let us know in the comments below!
#25 My New Roots
Since 2007, nutritionist Sarah Britton has been sharing her love for whole foods and holistic nutrition on this blog, which features vegetarian, raw, vegan, and macrobiotic recipes, as well as plenty of words of encouragement for those looking to live a healthy lifestyle. Be on the lookout for her first cookbook, coming out March 31, 2015.
#24 I am a food blog
"Celebrating the awesomeness of food," this simple and fun blog recently won the 2014 Saveur Magazine editor's choice for best cooking blog and blog of the year. It features recipes inspired by their favorite restaurants "or just whatever's in the fridge," but that doesn't mean they're uninspired: they range from Chinese sausage carbonara to California roll nachos, and are illustrated by gorgeous photos. Many of these fun and creative recipes made it into the blog's cookbook, Easy Gourmet, which was released earlier this month.