Top 10 Tips for Cooking the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey

The Food Network is using infographics to help highlight some of their most popular cooking help articles. The Food Network Kitchen's Top 10 Tips for Cooking the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey Infographic is a great summary infographic for the holidays!

Armed with our top 10 turkey tips, you'll come out looking like a pro on Thanksgiving Day. Whether you're hosting your first Thanksgiving dinner or your fiftieth, these indispensable tips will help you turn out a terrific turkey.

You'll notice the infographic is very brief and light on the details. It's a short, easy-to-read summary that leads to a much more detailed, full-length article 10 Tips for Cooking the Perfect Thanksgiving Turkey that goes into detail for every one of these tips.

From a marketing point of view, this is a great use of infographics. The infographic doesn't have to go into exhaustive details. Just a quick summary that leads people to more information on the website.

The Ultimate Guide to Buying a Juicer

The Ultimate Guide to Buying a Juicer infographic from Juice Producer introduces you to the benefits for juicing and helps you decide what types of juicer is best for you.

Here is our happy infographic guide to buying a juicer, the things you might want to look out for and things to avoid to get the juicer that is going to be right for you.

Simple icons and illustrations create a very informative infographic for readers. An informative infographic is much more likely to be shared than one that feels like an advertisement. It also builds credibility for the publisher, Juice Producer, by being an expert in the industry and sharing easy-to-understand information.

However, there are a couple things I would change. 

• Minimize the text. Paragraphs are too much for an infographic
• Include the URL. Where can readers find the original full-size version?
• Better color choices. Yellow text on the orange backgrounds are very hard to read

Thanks to Dave for sending in the link!

Baking Units Demystified

Memorizing cooking unit conversions can be frustrating. Most of us just have a cheat sheet on the refrigerator that tells us that 1 Gallon= 4 Quarts. Well thanks to Andrew M.H. Alexander you might want to replace those boring magnets with the Baking Units Demystified infographic!

Infographics should simplify information and make it easier to understand without “dumbing it down.” This is a perfect example of showing the measuring relationships to make them easy to understand and even remember.

Found on Flowing Data.

Chef Hari Ghotra's Key Ingredients Infographics

The Garlic, Mint, Ginger and Chilli infographics are from Indian Chef Hari Ghotra’s blog. These informational infographics point out the key ingredients that are used in many Indian dishes, and discusses their benefits in a fun, engaging way.

I love the consistent design language and color scheme for each different ingredient.  Seasonality is visualized, but it’s disappointing to see some of the other statistics only shown as text. Big fonts are not data visualizations!

Thanks to Ellie for sending in the link! 

Grandma's Apple Pie Infographic Recipe

Delicious and informative! The Grandma’s Apple Pie infographic from Task & Tool shares the recipe to delicious success when making apple pies as a visual, illustrated recipe!

This apple pie tastes delicious. It’s inspired by Grandma Ople’s Apple Pie. The 4.8 star rating from over 5000 reviews doesn’t lie - this recipe is fantastic. 

This is our first illustrated recipe. When I’m following recipes, I hate when I start cooking and then lose my place every time I need to find the next step on the recipe. The goal of this recipe design is to make it easier to find your place with helpful illustrations.

The other thing that bothered me is having to go from the recipe instructions to ingredients list to find the right quantity of each ingredient. Abigail designed these recipes with colored icons to help you go back and forth between the recipe design and the ingredient quantities easily.

Also, these recipes are designed to look pretty =)

Fun and delicious, a great combination! I love the use of the hand-drawn chalkboard look. It is a reminder of an old fashion teaching style with an old favorite, apple pie. Good use of color, and visuals (3D and 2D) with minimal words.

They have the TaskAndTool.com URL in the footer at the bottom, but it should include the URL to the actual infographic landing page on their site. Don’t make visitors search your site to find what they are looking for.

Thanks to Gavin for sending in the link!

This for That: A Guide to Cooking and Baking Substitutions

You’re cooking dinner and suddenly you realize you forgot an ingredient at the store! No worries, the This for That: A guide to Cooling and Baking Solutions infographic from eReplacementParts.com can help avoid the crisis by giving you easy solutions for the common missing ingredient.

Need an egg and your neighbor isn’t home? Check our guide to baking substitutions to see what else will do!

A fantastic topic for an infographic, and can be used as a handy guide.  The Online Lifespan of this topic should also last for years!  As a suggestion, knowing that people might want to keep a printout of this design in their kitchens, a PDF version would be a nice addition.

The ingredient illustration colors blend into the background too easily. The words are easy to read but the pictures are harder to see. The infographic is also missing it’s own url at the bottom of the graphic.

The infographic is well organized as well as balances graphics with words evenly.

Found on Lifehacker.com

Hack Your Grill

Are you planning on grilling for Memorial Day? Check out the recommended cooking instructions for your meal with the Hack Your Grill infographic from Column Five.

With Memorial Day weekend right around the corner, we can’t wait to get our beer and BBQ on. But mastering the grill can be tricky, whether it’s raw veggies or red meat. To help us crack the code, we created the helpful infographic to make sure everything cooks at the right temperature and time.

Column Five created this guide to average cook times to take the guesswork out of grilling. The guide provides average times for a wide variety of beef, poultry, pork, and vegetable items you might plan on throwing on the grill this summer—all you’ll need is a watch and a meat thermometer.

An easy-to-read, clear guide to grilling times, this design does a great job of focusing on telling one story really well.

The tall format design works really for sharing online, but I would bet that many people will want to print this out as a cooking reference.  It would be nice to have a separate PDF version that breaks the design into two printable pages that readers can print out to keep near the grill.

I would recommend two things to improve the information included in the footer.  First, the sources list only shows the main URL of the sites where the data came from.  This means that any readers would have to search for the information themselves on those sites.  It would be more transparent to list the URL directly to the report or web page that shows the specific data used in the infographic.  

Second, the footer should include the URL directly to the infographic landing page on the Column Five site.  Sadly, many blogs and sites will share an infographic without appropriately linking back to the infographic landing page, and by putting the URL in the infographic itself readers will always be able to find the original.

Thanks to Column Five for sending in the infographic! 

Food & Wine Pairing Method

A great infographic for National Drink Wine Day (February 18), the Food & Wine Pairing Method is a new poster from Wine Folly that shows all of the compatible and Best wine matches for different foods and preparation methods.

See the theory of food and wine pairing in action with this easy to use chart. Then, understand the simple science behind food and wine pairing based on our basic sense of taste.

You can learn the fundamentals of how taste components like sweet, sour, spice, bitter and fat go together. Then, try pairing wine by letting the characteristics of your food suggest your wine.

Available for purchase for $24, it’s also available as a high-resolution download so you can print out your own personal poster.

The design is very clean and colorful.  The circles in the table only have two different sizes, small and larger.  There can be many small circles to show all of the compatible wines, but only one “Best” match shown with the large circle.  The multi-ingredient direction down the left side are easy to understand, but it is still a little difficult for readers to visually compare rows that are not adjacent, and far apart.

The Best Temperatures for Cooking Fats & Oils

What a great topic for an infographic!  Different oils have different smoking points. and the Kitchen 101: Cooking Fats & Oils infographic from Chasing Delicious helps you make sense of them.

When it comes to cooking and baking, there is no shortage of fats and oils. Plants, flowers, seeds, nuts, animal fat, and milk almost all seem to end up as a cooking oil or fat at one point in time or another. And today, a trip down the oil isle makes it clear just how many choices exist. But can they all be used interchangeably? And if not, what do you have to take into consideration?

The answer to the first question is a big no. And to answer the second question, you must take in to consideration four main aspects of a cooking oil or fat: 1. smoking point, 2. flavor, 3. how it interacts with other ingredients, and 4. its nutritional value.

No, you can’t just trade out EVOO for peanut oil and expect the same results on the stove!

The circular bar chart is easy to understand for the audience, and the color gradients make comparisons simple between the different oils and fats.  The light colors used in the center arcs make the text hard to read though.  Available as small printed posters, this infographic would make a great addition to any kitchen.

Found on Lifehacker

Thanksgiving Timed Right

Thanksgiving Timed Right is a timeline infographic from allrecipes.com that helps everyone plan when to start cooking each dish for Thanksgiving dinner.  You want everything to make it to the table at the same time right?  I especially appreciate the Wine Breaks!

Great idea, and I know many, many people that struggle to figure this out on their own.  As an infographic released on the web, it really needs to have the URL back to the original full-size version included in the footer.  Many people are going to share this infographic with friends and family, but very few with correct link back to the Fresh Bites Blog where you can find the original.

The topic choice here is fantastic!  This design will have an Online Lifespan of many years as people go looking for this information every November.

Also found posted on Scribd by StephanieRobinett