3 Ways to Manage Your Recipes, From Paper to Digital

It’s easy to lose track of where you’ve seen a good recipe you wanted to try later. While lots of online recipe sites have great options that let you save recipes to your account, you still have to remember which recipe site had the one you’re looking for.

Then you may have to sort through dozens or hundreds of recipes you’ve marked, and struggle to think what tags or categories you might have put them under – if you even have that option. And that’s not even touching all the hard copy recipes you’ve collected from magazines and other sources, or that friends have scrawled on napkins for you. Or the index cards you’ve inherited from moms and aunts and grandmas, or found at estate sales.

The trick to organizing recipes is to pick a system and stick with it. It can be all digital, all paper, or a hybrid system. What’s important is that there’s only one or two places for any of your recipes to be.

There are, of course, a few ways to organize a collection of recipes, and the one you choose will depend on what’s convenient to you.

Categorizing Your Recipes

Whatever system you use, put some thought into categorizing them. Whether it’s binder tabs or app categories, organize them in ways that make sense to you, and feel free to change your system over time.

Some categories could include:

• Main Dishes
• Appetizers and Snacks
• Soups and Salads
• Baked Goods
• Desserts
• Vegetarian/Vegan
• Holidays and Seasonal

1. Going 100% digital

It’s easier than ever to keep all your recipes online. The only problem is that your own handwritten recipes will have to be typed or scanned in. But you can scan handwritten recipes you’ve inherited and upload them into your docs. That saves you a lot of time typing.

BigOven is actually designed for this. You can add links to recipes you find online or type in your own recipes. They all end up neatly arranged and searchable in your free account. They have mobile apps so you can collect recipes from your phone.

Pin

Pinterest is another option many people use for this. You can organize recipes you find into boards and the boards can have subsections. It’s great for browsing, but not so great for finding that chicken something something alfredo dish you vaguely remember pinning 6 months ago. Be sure to use boards and sections to make it easier to drill down and find what you want.

Spreadsheets

You can also keep a Google doc or word processor doc of recipes. This takes more effort, but you can easily search for a single keyword or phrase to find the recipe you want.

Scan and Organize Printed Recipes

If like the idea of using an app for collecting good recipes online, but you also have a lot of printed recipes from family cookbooks or magazine clippings, it’s easier than ever to scan these in. Many recipe apps will let you upload an image of a recipe from your phone, so all you need to do is snap a picture.

Paprika works especially well for this. It’s a paid phone app that lets you save recipes from the web, organize them into custom collections, and even create shopping lists. It also has tools for scaling recipes.

Evernote, Joplin (free!) and similar notes taking apps can also be used to store scans of old recipes. I personally would choose Joplin because you have nested notebooks within nested notebooks plus tags. Each notebook could be a type of recipe, and the tags could be ingredients or dietary classifications. And both of these have a good web clipper for mobile and desktop that will let you clip any recipe from online.

The Paper Binder

Pin

Some people have seen too many apps suddenly shut down to trust them with their recipes. They’ve got a point. Using a paper system is one way to have complete ownership over your collection.

Plus, you can store your recipes in sheet protectors, making it very safe for them to be in the kitchen where spills could happen.

The trick with this system is simply to print off the recipes you find online, on regular paper. And print your own recipes when you type them up.

Here’s how I’ve used this system in the past:

• Get a notebook with some tabs. You might choose alphabet tabs, or category tabs like “dinner” and “breakfast” or whatever works for you. You can buy blank tabs that you can easily write on with a pen, so that’s super-easy to customize.
• You can punch holes in your recipe pages and stick them in the binder, or you can use sheet protectors so that if they get splashed in the kitchen, the ink won’t run. Whatever you do, if you have a scanner, we recommend scanning your collection so you can always replace any paper recipe that gets damaged.

Advantages of a paper system: one great thing about a paper system is how you can just scribble notes on it as you’re working in the kitchen. If you keep them in a sheet protector, you can write on it with dry erase markers and later decide if you want to add the notes to the actual page itself.

The Index Card system

Pin

If you’ve got an index card box of recipes already, you might want to stick with it. Index cards are a time-tested way to keep recipes on file.

The one shortcoming is that you can’t print online recipes directly onto index cards. But you can print them, fold the paper, and put that in a recipe box.

Or when you don’t have time to write it all down, you can jot down the name of the recipe and where you found it on the card. This makes your index card system a bit like the old card catalog systems at libraries.

Your source might be a website, a particular issue of a magazine, a book, or even a person who gave it to you. You can take the time to write it out later or add it to your digital library, depending how you like to keep your recipes.