Let's Talk Baking: The Top 5 Online Baking Forums

Whether you're a beginning baker or an established pastry chef, odds are you like to chat about your baking love with others who also enjoy your craft. For beginners, baking forums are fantastic places to ask any questions you might have about recipes, substitutes, techniques, or other baking-related quandary. For the more advanced baker, forums provide places to share a most recent creation, give advice to others, or shoot the breeze about recipes and general baking discussions.

Wondering where you can get in on the action? Bakers have created online communities that have grown and proliferated along with the expansion of the Internet. There are some really active baking communities online that are easy and fun for all bakers to get involved with. Here are some of the top baking forums online today.

King Aruthur Flour

From one of the most popular flour brands in the U.S. comes this community, where bakers of all levels ask questions, have discussions, and share recipes. The King Arthur Flour site actually features two communities - one for all bakers, and one for pro bakers. There are many different discussions to get involved with, and the community is quite active. Although, the regular group is much more active than the pro group. You can also use the site to keep a recipe box, make friends, and have a personal page where you can add photos and recipes, and see the forum topics you've posted in.

Serious Eats

Serious Eats has really taken off over the last couple of years. It's updated often, and features recipes from all over the world. For bakers, it has a whole sub-site devoted to sweets, which features a forum community. There, visitors talk about many different topics, from birthday cakes to pies and holiday-themed baking. You can easily leave the sweets section to talk about anything food and drink related. And if you're lucky enough to live in one of their featured cities, they've got sub-sites for all food-related things in those cities.

Very Best Baking

This is Nestle's branded site that features recipes, resources, coupons, and more that use Nestle products. However, don't let the branding scare you away. The community is fairly active, and doesn't necessarily involve anything Nestle. Bakers there chat about chocolate, their latest baking adventures, beginner advice, and more. You can also keep a recipe box on the site, find recipes for upcoming holidays, and stare at a lot of chocolate things.

The Fresh Loaf

If you're a bread baker, this site is for you. The Fresh Loaf describes itself as "a community for ammeter artisan bakers and bread enthusiasts," and it is exactly that. Whatever it is you need to know about bread, you'll find it here. But if you're a cookie baker, don't fret! They also have forums about other sweet treats, and helpful guides and advice to help you begin your bread baking adventures. There are also book reviews about cookbooks, links to baker blogs, helpful videos, and just about anything you could need to start baking bread.

Food.com

Food.com is one of the top food website on the web today, and the forum is pretty active. There are forums for just about any type of cooking or baking that you enjoy, and tons of recipes available a click away. They also have a live chat room, if you'd like to go that route. The only problem with this one is that there are SO many forum topics, and you can't create your own. But you can create your own post within those topics, and there's a topic for everything. Just log in and start exploring!

Joli D

About the Author:

Joli D. writes for Become a Better Baker, providing baking tips and techniques, baking conversions, recipes, ideas for baking with kids, and more to bakers everywhere.