How to Search for Recipes Using Emoji (!!?!)
We wear emoji, we express our emotions in emoji form, we even customize them to make them look more like ourselves. It seems safe to say the days of the semicolon and parenthesis smiley faces are far, far behind us. The latest use for the cute little icons? Well, apparently we can now use them to cook.
This morning, New York Times Editor, Sam Sifton dropped a tweet announcing that you can now search for recipes in the cooking section of the newspaper’s website using emoji. For example, instead of typing “lemon chicken” you can simply input the emoji version of both of those things in the search bar. To see how well it works, we tested this particular search and received 241 hits, among them: roasted chicken with lemon preserves, lemon-garlic-pepper chicken wings and chicken soup with lemon and leeks.
Let’s be honest here: when it comes down to it, it’s probably not actually any faster to find the emoji for what you want than it is just to type it out in text. However, it is a whole lot more fun. Think of this as a creative way to scout out new recipes when you’re in a cooking slump. Input the pizza and French flag emoji and you’ll get a recipe for a Provençal Onion Pizza. Input the red shirted runner and you’ll get a recipe for pasta with kale pesto and roasted butternut squash that’s designed especially for the hungriness of a long distance runner. Have no idea what you want for dinner tonight? Type in your favorite emoji (yes, even the dancing girls) and see what pops up.
Aside from getting a bit creative with your recipe curation process, let’s also consider how great it will be to host a dinner party and after someone asks you where you found the recipe you respond with, “emoji helped me find it.” There are definitely a lot of emoji combinations to get us started, but with those 37 new emojis headed our way next year, the possibilities are about to be endless. Korean-inspired tacos anyone?
Try out the new emoji search bar and let us know what interesting combos and recipes you find. Share with us in the comments below!
