Everyone has a passion, and for a lot of people one of those passions is food. You have to eat, but you don’t have to eat poorly or eat food that doesn’t taste good. Still, learning all about different kinds of food, how to prepare it, and even what nutritional value it adds to your diet is time consuming.
Food blogging offers you an opportunity to put that research to work for you. From monetizing your blog to connecting with other bloggers and broadening your education, there are a ton of great reasons to start blogging about food.
This type of blogging offers you another advantage though. Food blogging can help you (and your readers) refine your taste. How? Here are five ways food blogging helps you refine your taste.
Try New Foods
You might be game for this type of culinary adventure anyway, but having a food blog can help you venture out and try new foods. You’ll not only want to try new places to eat, but also to prepare those types of meals yourself.
From finding new places to buy meat and vegetables to discovering new ethnic specialties in your area, trying new foods can be a real adventure and something your readers will be interested in.
If you love food, venturing out and trying new foods is probably a part of your current lifestyle anyway, but a food blog gives you a place to share with others and gather new ideas for place and dishes to try.
Learn New Cooking Methods
Turkey is a great Thanksgiving staple, but cooking one is an art form that few truly master. You can cook the bird in an oven breast side down or breast side up. You can grill or deep fry your turkey, smoke it, cook just a breast, and even trim the fat first and make it a healthier dish.
Turkey is just one example. Potatoes fried, baked, hashed, julienned, grilled, scalloped, and the many other ways you can think to make them are all about cooking methods. Since ancient times when we cooked over fire and eventually added pans and Dutch ovens to modern stoves and pressure cookers, we have been looking for new methods of preparing our favorite foods.
Food blogging exposes you not only to your own exploration of cooking methods, but that of your readers, restaurants you visit, and the comments and content created by your blog readers. Your blog also provides you with a forum for testing those methods, comparing and reviewing them. You learn more when you share and teach others.
Spice it Up
Ah, the spice debate. There are everything from the no-spice methods to brines, rubs, marinades, and more. There are literally hundreds of spices out there, and many varieties of each. Chili powder depends largely on the chilis that are used to make it. If the peppers are roasted first, you get a smoky or roasted taste to the powder itself, and you can create that flavor by making your own spices.
Then there are exotic spices like the ones from Asia and Africa that are often hard to find in the United States, but well worth looking for online. These spices can make or break an ethnic dish and change the taste entirely if something else is substituted.
There are also different varieties of common spices like cinnamon, cumin, and paprika. The taste difference and strength of each is unique and exploring them is a sure way to change the way you prepare your food. A food blog allows you to try and review a variety of spices and tastes enabling you and your readers to refine your palate and taste.
Go Outside Your Norm
It is easy to get stuck in a rut. Grilled and smoked food in the summer is great and lets you prepare dinners without heating up the kitchen. However, even that can get boring for your family, and going outside your food norm is a good way to keep interest in your dinners and please those around you.
A food blog typically involves more than just your exploration of food, and includes guest posts and other foodies taking part in discussions on your blog. Their insight can help you venture outside your food norms and prepare unique meals even if you are using the same ingredients and methods.
Since you are already exploring different spices, methods, and foods, going outside your norm will become your new normal, and from time to time your family might beg you for the same old thing once in a while.
Outfit Your Kitchen
A food blog is not just about cooking methods and types of foods, but about the equipment you use to get it all done or to store all of those spices. Everything from appliances to the pans you choose and the knives and cutting surfaces you bring into your kitchen can make a difference in your cooking.
Want to refine your taste? It is more than just about food, but about the taste that an item imparts to that food, or a method that helps you achieve that flavor.
A food blog is one of many ways to refine your taste, but it will introduce you to new foods, help you learn new cooking methods, spice things up and go outside your norm, and even outfit your kitchen with better appliances, utensils and more. Start a food blog today, and see where it can take you.