For some people, recipes are just lists of ingredients and few directions. If you enjoy cooking, though, you know there’s nothing more valuable than a reliable recipe.

Recipes are culture, history and tradition. They’re also heirlooms you can pass along to your children. Sometimes recipes are challenges that make you a better person or inspiration that helps you unleash your creativity. In other words, recipes are awesome, but as you grow your collection, there’s a pressing need to organize them neatly!

As with any other recollection of knowledge, there are many ways of organizing recipes, and each method has its pros and cons. Here’s how to organize your recipes in many ways — see which one sings to you!

Why Keep Track of Recipes?

First things first. Why keep track of your recipes? For starters, because you want to be able to quickly find that recipe for your mom’s pudding or that exciting recipe you just saw online and want to give it a go. With cooking, timing is everything, and recipes are time savers. If you can’t find the recipe when you need it, though, you might as well order pizza.

Keeping track of your recipes allows you to plan your meals and grocery shopping; it lets you keep track of your diet and ensure you and your loved ones are well cared for. Think of your recipe collection as your very own personal chef — one that helps you cook anything you want with reliable results.

Tips for Organizing Recipes

Before we dissect all the different ways to store and organize recipes, here are some quick tips to make the task easier. Follow these tips for organizing recipes, and you’ll be on the right track to create the perfect recipe organizing system.

Tweak the recipes

If you find a recipe online or in a magazine and try it out, don’t forget to make margin notes, adjust the quantities and write down your overall impression. Recipes are meant to be perfected, so adjust them to your cooking style!

Write down the when and where

Write down every time you used a recipe and note when and where you made it, including the people who enjoyed the meal. The next time someone asks you for the recipe for cranberry sauce you made two years ago, you’ll be able to find it quickly.

Classify your recipes

The most important tip for an organized recipe collection is classifying the information, not only in starters, mains and desserts but also in recipes for casual dinners, holidays and special occasions. Read on and get to know the different ways of organizing recipes.

Different Ways of Organizing Recipes

  • Have you tried this recipe yet?

    The first way of organizing recipes is to divide them into two groups: recipes you already tried and know are reliable and recipes you saved to try someday. Knowing what works and what doesn’t is critical here.

  • Recipes, from A to Z.

    Organizing recipes as your phone stores contact names might sound obvious, but it’s not as reliable as you think. Did you store that recipe under ‘R’ for roasted turkey, or was it under ‘C’ for Christmas turkey?

  • From starters to dessert.

    You’ve undoubtedly seen cookbooks use this method to organize recipes, starting with appetizers and ending with desserts. This method is even more helpful if you organize the recipes alphabetically inside each section. Of course, if you’re using a handy app to store your recipes, you can just use the search bar.

The Best Ways of Organizing recipes.

Now that we’ve warmed up, let’s explore the different methods of organizing recipes. See if you already use one and try others out! The goal here is always the same, to have your favorite recipes in hand whenever you need them.

From keeping track of your recipes on a notebook to using cloud storage services, these are the most common ways of organizing recipes, including their pros and cons. No system is perfect, that’s for sure, but there’s certainly one to suit your needs. Let’s get started!

1. Write Down Your Recipes on a Good-old Binder or Notebook.

Grandma’s favorite method, the good-old recipe notebook. Writing down your recipes in a binder or notebook is fun and incredibly personal. Reliable? Not that much. For starters, a recipe notebook is at risk of getting ruined every time you pull it out while cooking. Sure, some splatters and grease spots give personality to any recipe notebook, but let’s face it, it’s no longer the best way of organizing your recipes.

Even if you try to transcribe your favorite recipes into a notebook, chances are you won’t write down every new recipe you see on TikTok. If you want to keep a recipe notebook, by all means, do so. It will be a lovely wedding gift for your daughter, but don’t expect your recipe binder to meet your daily needs!

2. Save Recipes on Pinterest Boards

Pinterest is fantastic; find inspiration for any dish and ingredient in seconds through an infinite scroll browser. Yes, you can save your favorite posts for later, and you can even make your own boards.

The thing with Pinterest is that everything looks easy to make and delicious, but when things look too good to be true, they probably are. First, you must find a recipe you like and click through to (hopefully) land on the actual recipe in someone’s blog. Then it’s a guessing game. Does the recipe actually work? Are the comments below real?

Pinterest is fantastic for cooking inspiration, but this is no place to store your recipes. Unless you’re a blogger or a YouTuber and have uploaded tons of recipes, chances are you won’t find what you’re looking for.

3. Store Your Recipes on Google Drive

Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple Cloud and others changed the way we store and share information, that’s for sure. On top of that, you can access the cloud from any device, which is incredible. Are cloud storage services suitable for organizing recipes?

Suppose you make folders for every type of recipe categorized by type of cuisine or by meal-type and add a folder for thanksgiving recipes or whatnot. Now what? Once you have over ten recipes uploaded to the cloud, you’ll have no reliable way of finding what you need when you need it. Why not just keep all those files on your computer’s desktop? What’s the difference?

Store a backup of all your recipes on your favorite cloud; that’s a great idea! But you still need an organized system that lets you find recipes by title or ingredients and a way to have your favorite recipes conveniently bookmarked.

4. Take Notes on Evernote

Evernote works as a cloud storage service, but it’s much more; you can clip stuff you like on the Internet, link them to other websites, and create notebooks for different needs. If you want to take notes and have access to them while in the supermarket, or just want to save some recipes to try, Evernote might be for you.

There are a few downsides to the handy online organizing software. There’s no way of organizing information in folders. You can take notes on different notebooks, and that’s it. It’s also not focused on recipe organization, so there’s no way of looking for recipes by ingredient or occasion unless you go through the lengthy process of manually tagging everything.

If you’re under 30, chances are you’ll find Evernote easy to use, but try making your mom add her recipes note by note, and you’ll soon find out there’s surely a better way.

5. Start Your Own Blog

Ok, this is not properly organizing recipes, but if you start a cooking blog and gradually upload your favorite ones, you’ll soon have a way to find them fast and easy. There’s more. Hopefully, you’ll get some visitors, and you might even get a few comments and feedback.

Starting a cooking blog is encouraging, and it’s not dissimilar to writing down your recipes in a notebook — the main difference being that you’re sharing your recipes with the world!

Successful blogs have hundreds of recipes, and if you trust the blogger, you’ve got yourself a great source of inspiration to organize your meal plan. Why not be a blogger yourself?

6. Explore Recipe Apps

Recipe apps have proven to be the solution for your every recipe organizing need. The problem is, there are so many to choose from! Some are just not even worthy of being available on the app store, and others are incredibly difficult to use, that if they’re in a language you understand.

Some apps, though, are game-changers; they rely on cloud storage for nearly infinite recipe storage space; they come with smart search engines to find recipes by ingredient or name and can let you pin your favorite recipes with a click.

Make sure the app lets you search for recipes and add images to identify them easier, and if it enables you to organize recipes by category, then you’ve found a winner.

Start Organizing your Recipes with Spiciko Today!

Talking about cool recipe organizing apps, we invite you to try out Spiciko Recipe Keeper. Meal planning and cooking made fun and easy. The nice-looking app allows you to store recipes and find them later by type of meal, ingredient or name. You can always have your favorite recipes pinned down right where you can see them, and you can even add images to recipes you upload yourself or find online!

A fantastic feature in Spiciko is the ability to categorize recipes, make your own categories, and choose a lovely icon for each. Talking about keeping things tidy! And it’s all customizable. By the way, your recipes are stored in a cloud and are instantly synced on all your devices. What’s not to love?

It’s time to start your recipe collection, and whatever method you use, just keep doing it. Just like cooking, keeping track of your recipes is a habit, so don’t stop, and you’ll soon have an impressive source of cooking knowledge!