The Edible Web By Barbara Benham Special to washingtonpost.com Wednesday, September 23, 1998

(Elisa Nader/washingtonpost.com)

Culinary cyberspace is exceedingly manageable, whether you use a search engine or build a base of four or five sites. Some food sites are self-contained, searchable recipe databases. Others only list links to other food sites. Many of these sites combine recipes and links and then add features like recipe exchanges, chat groups and online newsletters. What follows are some of the more innovative sites.

(Elisa Nader/washingtonpost.com)

A perfect gateway site is the Online Epicure. Food writers Janet Majure and Neil Salkind have compiled a lengthy but navigable list of links to other food sites. Click on "favorite" and you'll get a great sampling of what the Web offers foodwise. In one click, you can head off to Epicurious Food, the Conde Nast site that contains 8,000 searchable recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appetit magazines. In another click, you can hit www.ilovepasta.org, the National Pasta Association's saucy site. If you feel yourself getting hooked, you can sign up for the Online Epicure's free monthly column, which lists additional food sites or order the book of the same name.

Another well-connected site is Four Winds Food Specialists, run by nutritionists and authors Pamela Goyan Kittler and Kathryn P. Sucher. Like the Online Epicure, this site has no recipes. But it's a stellar source for links both general and exotic. While there's some emphasis on nutrition, great food does not get short shrift here. Especially useful are Kittler and Sucher's editorial comments. If they flag a site as "impressive" (like the Tokyo Food Page) or "a must see" (Mimi's Cyber Kitchen), chances are it's worth a visit.

In fact, food enthusiast Mimi Hiller's Cyber Kitchen is a world unto itself, a cozy if busy site whose recipes, links and advice make it well worth a stop. You can search recipes here, or tap into 30 categories of links. If you still can't find what you're looking for, Mimi's Cyber Kitchen includes a short primer on doing a Web-wide food search. "It's fun and easy and you won't believe how many things you'll find that you'll want to bookmark," Hiller writes. Her site uses Metacrawler to troll the World Wide Web. (You can also use search engines like AltaVista, Excite or Yahoo.)

Another huge repository of food information is the University of California's SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes. SOAR contains 37,000 recipes, as well as links to hundreds of food sites. The site is strong on international cuisine, with recipes from more than 50 countries. Searching the recipes database is seamless, although locating SOAR's links is a little tricky. To find them, you click on a particular category, such as "appetizers" or "Norwegian," and then scroll down the list of recipes to "related sites." But overall, this is a site well worth bookmarking.

Beginners will enjoy The Global Gourmet, whose motto is "We bring you the world on a plate." This e-zine, also known as the electronic Gourmet Guide (eGG), runs original articles, archives recipes and reviews food Web sites. Click on NetFood, and you'll be treated to critiques of sites like the Garlic Page (a fast-loading and easy-to-use resource) and A World of Tea (which could be better organized).

If it's recipes you want, head to CookBooks On/Line. This site, the largest food endeavor on the Web, has one million searchable recipes on file. Searching is smooth, and you'd have to enter a pretty esoteric request to come up dry here. There are no links, however, but with that many recipes, who needs them? Access is free. The site also sells community cookbooks, features a chef-of-the-month column and a recipe exchange.

Several sites aimed at food professionals are remarkably bookmark-able. The Culinary Network is a straightforward compilation of shop talk and general food information. Home cooks and foodies will get the most out of the site's FoodNet feature, which contains original columns, food news stories and a respectable list of links. The links range from product sites (www.landolakes.com) to Chef's Personal Pages – Chef Tom Light, a rising star in Reno, beckons at www.cheftom.com. The Culinary Network's ChefNet feature is tailored for professionals, with sections for caterers, pastry chefs and culinary students. ChefNet also runs chat groups and classifieds.

If celebrity chefs are your role models, head for www.starchefs.com. Like the Culinary Network, StarChefs aims to enlighten the food professional, but there's loads here for home cooks as well. The site has been streamlined from its previous all bells-and-whistles self, and is far more usable in its present form. StarChefs has a much larger recipe database than the Culinary Network, and it's searchable. You can keep up with restaurant gossip (mainly personnel changes) in the James Beard Dateline feature. StarChefs' classifieds section enjoys an excellent reputation among food professionals. If you're not a food pro, you might have fun reading the original columns, like Cara De Silva's "A Fork in the Road" or Norman Van Aken's "A Word on Food." And don't skip StarChefs' links page: It's one of the best.

Remember that no food site is all-inclusive. Some noncommercial sites, like Berkeley's SOAR, don't list links to commercial sites. And some commercial sites don't mention the competition. So there are loads of "undiscovered" food sites out there, especially if you have a particular food interest, whether it's cake decorating (Cake Decorator's Cyber-Home, maintained by one Dolores McCann) or chile capsaicin counts (Greg's Salsa Page) – capsaicin being the stuff that makes chiles hot.

Before you start surfing, keep in mind this bit of cyber-culinary wisdom: Not every recipe you find online has been kitchen tested, let alone proofread. So take each one with, er, a grain of salt.