If you've ever wondered about food porn, Gojee can inform you with a glance. Today (Sept. 5) Gojee has taken its year-old revolutionary approach to online recipes and released free apps for iPad, iPhone and Android devices.
Unlike other food and recipe sites , Gojee includes only photos that are delectable enough to fill an entire screen.
"It doesn't take 10 data points to look at a pair of Louboutins and know they're gorgeous shoes," founder Michael LaValle told TechNewsDaily. "In the same way, a beautiful food shot doesn't have to be explained for you to know you want to try the dish."
But Gojee is more than a collection of exceptional food photos . Behind the photos, are what LaValle calls obtainable recipes, each from food bloggers that have been vetted by LaValle's team.
"Most of our contributors are home cooks and they make these recipes all the time," he said. "We look for bloggers that have their own perspectives on food." Gojee's contributors have doubled to 300 over the past year and represent a wide range of regional cooking, use local ingredients and may have submitted recipes passed down for generations.
We took a test drive of the new app for iPad , compliments of Tian He at Gojee. Searching Gojee is based on three simple factors: what you crave, what you have and what you dislike. Say you're craving something sweet (dessert), have a box of raspberries and dislike coconut. That particular combination turned up 68 suggestions. Tap a recipe title bar and the box expands to show all of the ingredients needed, a brief description, photo of the food blogger and a link to the full recipe on the blogger's website. Selections can be saved to "favorites" for later reference.
Over the past year, LaValle noticed that about a quarter of users prefer vegetarian dishes, another quarter are meat eaters and the rest — dessert lovers with a preference for chocolate.
Browsers can share selections to Facebook, Twitter or email to a friend. However, LaValle said people tend to keep their recipes to themselves and collect hundreds of favorites.
"How you browse by yourself is very different than how you'd do it with people watching," he said. "It's a guilty pleasure when people use our site and maybe that's why dessert searches are so prevalent."
LaValle said that Gojee has inspired him to cook more (he's trying every one of the more than 30 s'mores recipes on the site) and it has changed the way he eats out at restaurants. Now he asks himself, "Would it make it on Gojee?" and most important, "By looking at it, can I recreate it?" His rule is you should be able to look at a dish and know what's in it. Picky eaters thank you.
Gojee is available for download in the App Store (iPad and iPhone), as well as in Google Play.