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Posts Tagged ‘Open Source Food’

FookFood: Behind Open Source Food

November 3rd, 2008 by AV Flox in food

Broccoli Soup, by Jon YongFook, used with permission.

Open Source Food is a community entirely devoted to sharing well-illustrated recipes. The only thing more amazing than the recipes people share on there is the quality of the photographs users take of their creations.

Tonight, as I threw together a snack at 3:00AM, I cross-examined Open Source Food’s creator, the web developer, mastermind and ladies’ man Jon YongFook.

How and when did you come up with the idea for Open Source Food (OSF)?

Well, the basic idea was to make a recipe site that had pics for each recipe. I don’t know about you, but it drives me nuts browsing recipe sites where all you see is text. Ever bought a recipe book that had no pictures? Exactly! That’s all I wanted OSF to be–a place where you could get recipes and actually see the finished product of the recipe too, for every recipe on the site.

Had you been part of any food communities on the web before you launched OSF?

No. Funnily enough my interest in food came about quite suddenly, about 3 years ago. I never really cooked much before that, and never really watched cooking shows and what have you. Then one day bam, I was obsessed with cooking, my shelves are full of cookbooks and if I’m not watching Iron Chef or Gordon Ramsay on TV, I’m in the kitchen making something to eat. So very quickly after I found this interest in food, I started to think about making OSF, so I didn’t even have much time to get involved with other online food communities before I was coding away on the site.

How many people use OSF today and how many recipes are there?

OSF does over half a million page views per month and is home to over 3,000 recipes, each with a pic.

Some users have the word pro next to their names–how do you go pro on OSF? What features does being pro involve if any?

If your recipes receive a certain number of votes, you go pro. Being pro allows other users to find your recipes easier, since you have the option to filter by pro and non-pro users when doing recipe searches. It’s basically a quality assurance badge–if the recipe is by a pro user you know it’s going to be a good one.

Is OSF now anything like you imagined it would be?

I think it has worked out nicely as a pet project, yes.

The OSF2 launch earlier this year brought many great changes for users–has the site reached perfection or do you see more changes in the horizon?

It will change and improve. It’s not perfect in any way, yet. I want to encourage more interaction between users and have a few ideas for new features. It’s just finding the time, of course.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have encountered?

Nothing huge. One challenge was re-building the site from scratch for OSF2. The original version of OSF was built very messily. At the start of this year I rewrote the whole thing using an MVC framework called CodeIgniter. This helped standardize my coding conventions a little bit and just makes maintaining the code and rolling out new features way easier. I use CodeIgniter for everything now.

Twitter is known for its Tweet-Ups. Has OSF seen an equivalent where users get together to mingle and perhaps try out recipes?

That would be cool, but no I don’t think people have done that. This is what I mean about trying to encourage more interaction between users–I should figure out some features that would facilitate people meeting up for a cooking party.

Where do your recipes come from? Do you make them up as you go along or plan carefully?

Most of them are just kind of slung together. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to cooking. I’m not really much of a planner when it comes to anything, actually. My usual MO is to have a very clearly defined goal and then do whatever needs to be done to achieve that goal, with less planning and more of a trial / error approach.

What’s your favorite recipe and where did you learn it?

I think the broccoli soup recipe is one of my favorites. I learned it from Gordon Ramsay, who made it on one of his shows (it’s also in one of his books). I added the mushrooms, though. I just think it’s amazingly pure–the ingredients are pretty much just broccoli and water. Anyone can cook this and it looks stunning when you serve it. Tastes delicious, too.

Are you messy in the kitchen or do you clean as you prepare?

I’m very messy. If you took a snapshot of my apartment at any given moment in time, the kitchen would be the place I’d be most embarrassed about. It always looks like a bomb just went off.

You wrote a hilarious post once where you debated which dish would lead to a sexy time–what’s your most popular dish with the ladies?

I think the best dishes to cook for a lady are ones where she can join in a little in the preparation. I’ve never been on a date with a guy but I can imagine it would be incredibly awkward just sitting on the sofa twiddling my thumbs whilst the guy is frantically cooking in the kitchen. It just seems kind of false and disingenuous in a way, like I want you to sit there whilst I “create”, so you’re all indebted to me by the time I serve dinner and oh, by the way, you can pay back that debt by sleeping with me. Sod that. I like my women in the kitchen with me helping out so that when we eat there is a small sense of mutual achievement rather than an underlying, awkward imbalance of power.

One dish that goes down really well is bruschetta. It’s dead simple to make together (grill bread, rub garlic, top with tomatoes, olive oil, basil and salt) and tastes delicious as long as you get good-quality ingredients. So usually I’ll just make that with the girl whilst we chat and sip wine. And to those who have never seen it, the trick where you rub the garlic on the toasted bread almost like you’re grating it, is a really good tip–one that they can take away and use long after they grow bored of you and stop responding to your e-mails.

Have you ever considered having the sex before cooking?

Yes, sometimes it is appropriate to get the sex out of the way before focusing on the real issue: what to eat for dinner.

Got any advice for the uninitiated and culinary inept?

Invest in good salt and good olive oil. Your food will instantly taste a million times better.

pass it on!

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