Mahalo food how tos are built the same way as other how to pages. You need to be accepted as a how to writer, select or request a how to page, research your topic, and complete the page in tasks before submitting it for approval. As with all Mahalo pages your work needs to be original, unique, and backed up by citations to good sources.

Food how tos do have their own nuances, however, and this guide will help you through some specific aspects of writing your food how to.

General food How tos provide general instructions that a reader can use to learn how to make a certain food. These pages may include a basic recipe, as well as variations. The goal of these pages are to provide more than a basic recipe for a food- the aim is to teach the user how to prepare the food. How to Make Pasta Salad and How to Make Soup are examples of this type of how to.

A food how to can also explain a technique used in cooking. How to Separate Eggs and How to Cut a Mango are examples of this type of how to. There are also more general food technique pages, such as How to Bake which serve as general resource pages for a topic.

Recipe how tos can be among the trickiest type of Mahalo pages to write. They are done by researching a topic, and then combining the best aspects of how to make that specific recipe that you find in your research. It is not appropriate to take one recipe and paraphrase its content - that is not original content, and does not meet the standards for a Mahalo page. The way to write a Mahalo recipe page is to look for similarities in recipes to build the foundation, and then look for the differences to create original content.

1. Look for commonalities in recipes. For example, if you were to build a page on How to Make Vinaigrette Dressing, you might find that all recipes use a standard ratio of oil to acid liquid. If you see the same ratio several times, you'll know that the commonly used ratio is the right one to use.
2. Look for differences - in the salad dressing example, you may see one recipe using lemon juice, one using red wine wine vinegar, and one using cider vinegar. You can select one for your recipe, or advise the reader that they can use "1/3 cup of lemon juice, red wine vinegar, or cider vinegar". If one recipe uses 1 tablespoon of herbs, and another uses 4 tablespoons, you could include the instruction to use "1-4 tablespoons of fresh herbs, as desired."