Smthg gr8 4 brkfst? Twitter's recipes
Cooking tweets come from pros like Martha Stewart and chef Rick Bayless
R Twttrd recips a gr8 new thing 4 bkg & ckng or r the dirctns 2 confusng for most peeps?
Within the endless streams of bite-size personal updates and random thoughts that populate the Twitter-sphere, now you also can find recipes for dinner, including from pros like Martha Stewart (@marthastewart) and Chicago chef Rick Bayless (@Rick_Bayless).
But there's a catch. Twittered cooking instructions are so compressed they often read like trigonometric expressions. Consider "Heat 3Tdashi, 1/2C miso, 4C H2O" or "Simmer 6 sm leeks w/2T but &1t salt & 1Cwater 10 min".
The recipes, like all tweets, conform to Twitter's ironclad 140-character limit, meaning directions that might fill a page in an old-school cookbook get seriously scrunched.
Critics say the micro-recipes — sometimes called Twecipes — too often are confusing and half-baked. But aficionados call it a modern way to bring cooking to the masses and, besides, puzzling out the instructions is part of the fun.
"Definitely it's a code, it's a hieroglyphic that people have to get over time," says Karen Solomon, a San Francisco-based cookbook author and recipe tweeter. "But so is LOL ... or the emotions like smiley faces that people have been using for years."
Solomon tweets super-short recipes running the gamut from sunchokes to strawberry shortcake as @chef140. Other cooks hitting Twitter with recipes include food columnist Lucy Waverman (@lucywaverman) and Maureen Evans (@cookbook), a prolific amateur cook with more than 15,000 followers.
The recipes are as diverse as the cooks, but the style is the same: extreme brevity. Recipe tweeters ruthlessly exclude all but essential ingredients and basic steps. They rely on the same character-saving shortcuts familiar to cell phone texters. Vowels are trimmed and symbols are common. Tablespoons become "T" and teaspoons "t."
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A recent tweet for salsa from Bayless, a James Beard award-winning chef, reads in full: Simple Guajillo Salsa:toast 2 clnd guajillos n med-ht oil 4 20-30 sec.Blend w 4 rstd tomatillos,3 rstd garlic,1/2c H20. Salt.
"It is something about bringing recipes down to their bare bones. I hate to use the word intellectual, but it's an intellectual challenge," says Waverman, author of four cookbooks. She'll often post "Twitterized" versions of her recipes in the belief that they're less intimidating.
Waverman's followers include Catherine Kustanczy, a Toronto-area resident who likes the recipes because their abridged style makes it easy to improvise. She also likes that she didn't have to search for a Waverman salmon recipe she cooked recently. It came to her.
"Going through a cookbook takes extra time, whereas it's already on Twitter," Kustanczy says. "It's already there, so you don't have to go and look something up, and look for inspiration."
That spur-of-the-moment quality also worked for Jason Rushin, a San Francisco-area resident who saw Solomon's sunchoke recipe stream by on a Monday afternoon and thought, "Boy, that's interesting. I'll try that tonight." It worked fine.
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