Katharine Capocci from The Journal chats to Alan Lowery, a man putting the sizzle back into our kitchens with his online cooking venture.
ALAN Lowery is positively passionate on his favourite subject of food, glorious food.
Whether it’s rustling up his favourite beef curry dopiaza dish, entertaining friends or tucking into a giant Sunday roast with his partner, TV weather correspondent Philippa Tomson.
A keen amateur cook, Alan has turned his hobby into a business venture, something many of us dream of doing.
His business, sizzledish.com, is described as an online community for keen home cooks. And members of said community are officially known as “sizzlers”.
Which leads us to the conversation we have over a coffee (and a breakfast of ham and egg panini for Alan).
Dressed in faded jeans, pristine shirt and smart pin-stripe jacket, Alan, 47, describes the venture as a one-stop shop for food lovers.
The site – attractively designed and easy to navigate – includes in the mix, video footage of amateur cooks getting creative in the kitchen, a recipe bank, restaurant reviews (some 28,000 of them nationally), competitions and giant cookshop.
Alan runs the business from the home he shares with Philippa in a village on the outskirts of Durham.
The basic idea is that the site is designed for food lovers by food lovers, and it’s a place where users and members can enjoy good food and share their cookery knowhow by video or text with other community members.
I particularly like the facility where you can type in up to three ingredients, be it chicken, beef, pasta or anything else that takes your fancy, and the site then throws up myriad recipe ideas. But the Sizzledish side of Alan’s life, while seeming all-consuming at the moment, is actually his creative outlet.
His day job is in the property business, where he owns Elite Management and Lettings Ltd, an upmarket agency dealing in residential properties.
For Alan, Sizzledish has been something of a labour of love and some 18 months in the making.
The site launched properly a couple of months ago and what makes it stand out as being different from other online cooking sites, reckons Alan, is the inclusion of videos of amateur chefs cooking in their kitchens.
That and the fact that it is something of a cooking community.
One of the videos features partner Philippa, one of the main faces of ITV1’s North East Tonight and Lookaround programmes, rustling up a Mars Bar cheesecake concoction.
However, Sizzledish is firmly Alan’s venture and nothing to do with Philippa.
Besides, Alan cheerfully admits he’s the cook at home.
He believes capturing recipes on video is a great way to encourage and instil confidence in fellow home cooks and have fun at the same time.
It’s far removed from the world of celebrity chefs, explains Alan. It is, he says, “normal people cooking in their kitchens”.
“I don’t think there’s anything out there with the same content that I have, with the community side of it, people sharing and rating recipes, videos, restaurants, a cookshop and competitions.
“Members are ‘sizzlers’ and you can follow other sizzlers a bit like Twitter and rate their dishes and leave comments. The idea first came to me of having videos of people cooking their own dishes. I thought it would instil confidence in people. It’s not chefs in hi-tech kitchens.
“It attracts home-cooking couples, food-loving singletons, busy parents juggling family and work, and young people learning the basics. It’s all about simple recipes and a simple approach to cooking.”
Alan adds: “I’m a very keen amateur chef. I have always cooked since my mid-20s. I wouldn’t say I was a la carte, but I like traditional things well cooked, like pasta, curries and roast dinners.
“I like doing dinner parties and cooking for friends. I tend to do easy things so you aren’t slaving over a hot stove, something like steak and mushroom pie or roasted cod.
“It often involves throwing something in the oven and pre-cooked things.
“I can look in the fridge, have a few ingredients and throw something together. I’m confident enough to do that.
“With the restaurants on the site it’s very much a living thing as reviews can be updated and food news added.” Alan’s a big champion of local, seasonal produce and has all the local restaurants listed on the site.
He stocks up on beef and pork from his local farm shop, Homer Hill, near Pittington.
It’s early days yet but Alan already has 250 sizzler members and 500 recipes on the site. Interest is growing by the day.
The cookshop, offering in the region of 30,000 foodie items from cookware gadgetry to books and DVDs, is affiliated to Amazon.
Alan sees Sizzledish very much as a long-term project.
“Sizzledish is the creative side of me,” he says. “It’s early days but I want to grow it.”
