Latest Web Bloggers Give Cooking: WSJ

PORTALS By LEE GOMES

Generic food blogs are the scrambled eggs of culinary blogging. They require little in the way of skill and next to nothing in terms of equipment -- just a digital camera and a broadband connection.

A particular kind of food blog, however, has become the genre's Canard a la Presse Tour d'Argent. These are "cook-through" blogs, in which someone picks a cookbook and then doesn't stop cooking and blogging until the dishes for every recipe have been washed and put away.

The necessary ingredient: You need to be a little crazy.

Carole Blymire, a Washington, D.C., public-relations consultant, for example, has been writing "French Laundry at Home" since last year. With no real cooking experience beyond Thanksgiving dinner, she is tackling the 130 or so recipes in Thomas Keller's "French Laundry Cookbook," which may be the most technically challenging American cookbook ever written.

No matter, says Ms. Blymire, "I just opened it up and said to myself, 'Let's see what happens.' "

The site has become a huge hit in the food blogosphere, winning awards and attracting 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day. It also has become the template for many other such cook-along blogs, with pictures of the dish at various stages of development and a rating of the final result. Personal asides are often folded in as well. (These are, after all, blogs.) Ms. Blymire uses a Miss Smartypants persona and often brags of her two loves: New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and bacon.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Latest Web Bloggers Give Cooking: WSJ