Recipe Management

In today’s digital world, long gone are the recipe boxes with 3”x5” note cards. Personal recipe books are leaving the shelves. But, we still need to keep track of food we like and food we want to make. My personal recipe (and other things) management tool is Google Keep.

Google Keep is a sort of virtual post-it-note style system that can be as robust or as simple as you want to make it. At its core, each note has a title (show in in bold) and details. Everything else is up to you.

I have created labels for the main categories of food I want to keep track of:

• appetizers/snacks

• Asian cuisine

• bars/brownies

• bread

• breakfast

• cake

• cheese

• cheesecake

• chocolate

• condiments

• cookies

• dessert

• dinner

• dip

• drinks

• ice cream

• Indian cuisine

• Italian cuisine

• Mediterranean cuisines

• pasta

• pies/tarts

• salads

• sandwiches

• sides

• soup

• veggies

From there, every note is color coded. The teal (such as the French Onion Labneh) indicates a recipe I have saved, but I haven’t tried to make yet. The blue (such as the Crispy Tacos) indicates a recipe that I have made, but it’s not quite a keeper as written. Maybe some aspect of it is good, maybe I made a substitution that didn’t work out and I’d want to try it again, maybe I have an idea to make it better. This is in the “okay but needs work” range of recipes. The dark blue (such as Kenji’s no-knead bread) indicates our go-to recipes. Stuff we’ve made a ton of times and know works every time. If there are any personal adjustments we do, I will make a note of it.

I do also use Keep for other things, such as crafting and personal notes (color coded in yellow or white), but the bulk of it is recipes. It’s easy to search, narrow down by label, and then visually see what you want to try or find your base recipes.

I’m curious, what sort of recipe management tools do you use?