Behind the Scenes of Food Network's Fall Entertaining Guides
One of the most recent additions to the Food Network website is the addition of product guides, guides in which readers are offered insight into some of the products that editors believe are among the best in helpful cooking tools, tabletop items and edibles available online. A lot of these product guides are tied to the season, like Food Network's Summer Cookbook Guide. In August the editors began working on our fall product guide. Thanksgiving may be several weeks away, but we have to start working on these guides as early as the summer months to make sure that every edible product that gets selected for the guide has been tested (i.e. eaten) and approved by our staff.
For about two weeks, our office was flooded with an array of samples — from gourmet marshmallows to specialty cocktail mixes and Thanksgiving gumballs (turkey-flavored included!). After organizing a formal tasting within Food Network’s digital department and consuming probably 20 times more than our daily allowance of sugar, the most-popular products were chosen.
The guide features much of the very best each region of the country has to offer, but in the end, the state with the most edibles in our product guide this year was awarded to New York — specifically, Brooklyn. Washington, whose state capital is teeming with specialty food vendors, came in a close second. Gourmet salts from Massachusetts, cake-balls from Austin and sweet potato butter from South Carolina also round out the guide.
Flip through the final picks of Food Network's Product Guides for Fall:
