I toyed with a recipe idea for awhile and eventually decided to pursue other alternatives, but this was my 'million dollar idea,' yours for free.

Creating another basic recipe website is a waste of time and it doesn't provide any benefit to anyone. There are already shit tons of these websites that have 99% of their recipes never tested whatsoever, they just get great pictures and throw them up. That being said, the food people like is completely subjective to their tastes, which poses the BIGGEST problem with every single recipe website and the biggest thing you can fix.

Think: a recipe website tailored to every single users personal taste. Based on questions they answer about food they like/don't like, based on their recipe history (which recipes they view on your site) and based on their ratings of recipes they cook. You then provide suggested recipes that your algorithm determines they should like. The biggest thing is that the recipes can be DYNAMIC. If a user doesn't like salt and a recipe calls for salt above the amount they like, you could present the recipe with the proper amount of salt to their liking.

Thus, you have personal recipes, dynamically tailored to every single user on your site. Something that simply does not exist today.

Look on allrecipes and you will see 75% of the comments saying "hey this was great, but I HALFED the butter and used cloves instead of nutmeg" or whatever. The best combinations of the recipe are actually in the comments, not the recipe itself.

That being said, if you really just want a database of recipes you will find the quickest solution is hiring a scraper to pull the data into a database.