Everything I've seen from the NYT web team(s) has been stellar work.

I'm wondering if NYT has a tech blog. They seem like an excellent resource to model oneself.

Times Open — Sharing our stories of making digital products at The New York Times.

https://open.nytimes.com

You may enjoy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19221446 | Remembering a Programming Language that Helped Shape the Digital New York Times

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877047 | 25 Years of New York Times Website Design History

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20940209 | New York Times Developer Portal

Cook's illustrated/ATK as well, if you have a subscription. The quality is superb.

Cook's Illustrated is great, their equipment reviews are top notch, and their sweet potato pie recipe is my goto every year. Although like NYT they made unsubscribing obnoxious.

Something I'm surprised I haven't seen mentioned is Serious Eats. J Kenji Lopez-Alt does some absolutely excellent recipes (hello Halal Cart Chicken & Rice).

The main thing that bugs me about CI is that I subscribe to their website and they still want me to buy an upgrade to access all the content. I get that there are subscription tiers but it just somehow feels a bit obnoxious to me.

Serious Eats is good too.

I used to use Epicurious quite a bit back when they were a pretty early-on serious website for recipes. But with the demise of Gourmet and other sites like the NYT upping their game, I don't consider them top-tier any longer.

I think really the most annoying thing is they try to brand themselves as having 3 distinct shows, websites, and books, but they're all the same people and company. Yet they make you buy a subscription for each separately.

As a business, the whole enterprise are really masters at repackaging and reusing to the point where it becomes more than a bit annoying. Though I like them overall and mostly more so since Kimball departed.

(Though, speaking of reuse, Kimball basically went and made an almost clone of CI that IMO was obnoxiously clode to a direct copy.)

While Kimball was kind of pompous, I like him much better as the host. Bridget and Julia just don't seem as fluid, and everything about the show feels more scripted. Although, I've watched milk Street as well, and bought the cookbook. I have to say, the quality of milk Street recipes is nowhere near that of America's test kitchen. I found the recipes to be bland and flavorless.

J kenji's origins are from America's test kitchen, so you see a lot of the same techniques be applied to his new stuff.

I'm amazed nobody's mentioned BBC Good Food yet, literally the only recipe site I use.

It is really that good.