Use hRecipe for creating Google Rich Snippets, for leveraging SEO results, and for attractively displaying your recipes.
When your recipes are displayed on your blog using the hRecipe microformat, it makes it very easy for search engines to find and do special things with them.
A microformat is a way of using CSS styles to add semantic information to web pages. The style not only directs how the information is displayed, but what kind of informatiin is displayed.
There are different microformats for different types of information. This plugin uses the hRecipe microformat for recipe type information. For more information, see to the main microformats site.
Yes and no.
According to Google, microformatting your recipe will not improve your search ranking, by itself. It's not a magic bullet, you still have to do the plain old SEO work you normally do.
However, when you're doing SEO right, many people have reported that having their recipes displayed as Rich Snippets improves their search results.
Microformatting may not improve your ranking but, microformatting will probably improve your results.
Think of microformatting as leverage.