How do you fit a whole recipe on seven slides?
The mistake is to treat a carousel like a blog post. A carousel is a recipe card that someone reads with one hand.
| Slide | What goes on it |
|---|
| 1 | The hook, plus the total time and the pan |
| 2 | The full ingredient list, weights and cups both |
| 3 | Prep: everything you do before the heat goes on |
| 4 | The first cooking step with its minutes |
| 5 | The second step, with the temperature in F and C |
| 6 | The finish: acid, herbs, resting time |
| 7 | How it keeps, and what to do with the leftovers |
Two things readers ask for every time: the pan size and the oven temperature in both scales. Put them on the slide, not in the caption, because the caption is not what gets screenshotted.
What should the photos on a recipe carousel show?
One overhead of the finished plate is the weakest possible carousel, because it repeats the same information seven times.
- Slide 1: the finished dish, darkened, with the hook large enough to read in a grid.
- Ingredient slide: everything in shot, unarranged. It should look like your counter, not a magazine.
- Method slides: the pan at that step, from above, with the timing in the corner.
- Last slide: the container it goes into, because the storage question is the top comment.
Generate the plain text backgrounds in the slideshow builder and shoot only the pan steps. Two real photos beat seven generated plates, because food readers spot a dish that was never cooked.
Keep health claims off the slides. No claim that a dish treats a condition, and no nutrition figures you have not calculated from the actual quantities.
How do you sell a cookbook without losing the save?
The recipe on the slides has to be cookable exactly as written. A carousel that stops before the oven temperature and sends people to a link gets one comment thread, and it is not about the food.
Publish the whole recipe, then use the last slide for the book or the blog version with the variations. A seven-slide recipe is 7 credits at 1 credit per slide, about 50 cents on the $49.99 plan for 700 credits and about 47 cents on the $199.99 plan for 3,000, which is less than the lemon.
Editing slide text and re-rendering costs nothing, so correct a timing after the first comment without paying again. Only a new image costs a credit.