Food is fun to shop for, sometimes even more so than clothes or electronics. Be honest. How many hours do you spend at your supermarket or even at a Williams-Sonoma?
But what do you do when you can't find certain things at your local spot? We're here to help with all of your geek-tastic foodie needs, from the expensive to obscure and extremely demographic-specific.
Let's go food shopping from the comfort of your computer:
Food52 Shop
Food52 is the popular food website created by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs. These ladies should need no introduction. They've created a social hub for people who absolutely live, breathe, and, well, eat food. Their Shop section covers everything you're looking to buy, from tea and honey to radish seeds and all the brands you've never heard of.
Foodzie
Launched last year, the website offers a wide variety of gourmet food from around the country, sorted by category, gift, region, or brand to make shopping easier. They also have a nifty box-of-the-month club, in which a box of curated products is delivered to your doorstep monthly for a mere $19.95. Also, everything on the site is produced by small growers and artisans.
Celebrities are always a big draw, and OpenSky takes advantage of it. The site is separated into four categories: Food, Style, Design, and Health. Sign up and click on Food. Once on the website, you'll be able to choose the celebrities you want to follow, and they'll give you their recommendations of their favorite foods. Whom can you follow? Tom Colicchio, Andrew Zimmern, and Ming Tsai are just a few. Even better: It's all customizable to your likes.
Gilt Taste
From the people who brought you extremely discounted Oliver Peoples sunglasses and Marc Jacobs clothes comes Gilt Taste -- the discounted heaven for gourmets. This is the place to find the obscure foodstuff you've been looking everywhere for. From Éclat chocolate to Mikuni wild harvest chef's blend mushrooms, the selection will please your palate. Plus, the famous Ruth Reichl is an editorial advisor. If nothing else, this is the place to buy ridiculously expensive items to brag about.
Artisan's Table
The website hasn't yet launched but is set to go live any day. Jedd Gold, one of the site's cofounders from California, hopes to create a national online community of true food lovers. Apart from becoming the go-to site for unique food stories à la Good Food Jobs and Edible Geography, Artisan's Table will feature daily offers of artisan goods from kitchens across the country. Sign up for the mailing list today for first dibs on news from the good-food site.
MCC-Shop
Everyone recently ;bid farewell to El Bulli (here's our coverage), but that doesn't mean you have to give up on your molecular gastronomy dreams. Channel your inner Ferran Adrià with the tools needed to get you started. Find it all on this website -- foams, dry ice machines, flavor pearls, and cotton candy machines. But if you're more the conventional type, there are also materials for chefs, bakers, and foodies -- i.e., everything. You might waste your whole afternoon on this expansive website.
FYI: We are in the market for new salt and pepper mills. Just sayin'.
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