Food52 Hotline: Crowdsourcing Answers to Burning Food Questions

Got a tricky or pressing food question? Ask the experts at Food52 and you'll get an answer free from some of the best food minds in the business in (almost) real time. You can pose questions for the Hotline via Food52’s website, via Twitter, through Food52's  iPhone app, or in its iPad cookbook, the Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide – and you'll get a response from Food52’s core membership of 50,000 highly active professional and home cooks. You can also answer questions you come across if you want to help.

"We’re building a widget that can be embedded in food blogs and sites that would expand our reach to a much wider audience,” founder Amanda Hesser disclosed in an interview with GigaOm. Whole Foods is already experimenting with it, incorporating Hotline into a series of local food portals it’s launching across the country and rebranding the service as FoodPickle. 

Food52 is also building a database of questions and highly rated answers, giving users instant access to a repository of stored knowledge about particular recipes or techniques. The more people use Hotline, the smarter it becomes.

So the next time you're wondering if it's okay to freeze bacon, what to do with pomegranate molasses, or have your own burning food question, check it out.

Food52 is a SAY Media partner.