Hello everyone, I’m curious about how everyone here store their recipes and organize them (and looking for ideas for me too).
At the very beginning, I started with paper recipes in a simple file organizer. Either printed or wrote by hand. But it quickly became too big, dirty, wet, and full of food stains.
I switched to following recipes on my phone when I cooked. First with a folder structure of bookmarks from my favorite websites. But it had several issues: a lot of recipes websites have crazy amount of bullsh*t writing around the recipe, and I cannot edit and adapt the recipe with my touch.
I tried a lot of android app during the years and finally converged to “whisk”, now called samsung food. I liked it because it could do meal plan and grocery list automatically on top of holding the recipes. But since it was bought, it’s getting worse and worse.
As my familly and friends know that I like to cook I received quite a lot of recipe books over the years, but I barely use them. Usually I read them once and copy the few interesting recipes i like in the app I am currently using.
I recently found that Nextcloud has a “cookbook” plugin. As I’m already self hosting a next cloud instance it’s perfect. It looks straight to the point, with all the basic features needed and no crap around. However it’s not doing meal plan and grocery list (yet ?).
As there is no automatic transfer possible between whisk and nextcloud, before I’ll spend hours to transfer my recipes I wanted to hear what other people are using !
I’m lazy and use the paprika app. It’s imperfect but does have a grocery list, downloads recipes and automatically removes the fluff and allows adding tags (so I have tags like slow cooker, vegetarian, chicken thighs etc.)
Haven’t tried it myself but I saw this on awesome-selfhosted and it looks pretty nice: https://docs.tandoor.dev/
Tandoor is good. A friend set up an instance with Authelia attached so my group of friends each gets a login. We add our fav recipes and can share them with each other.
It’s a little finicky with the ingredients entry, but it does make scaling recipes a lot better since it’ll do the calculations for you. You don’t need to know markdown to make the recipe pretty, it just worksI’m hosting my own instance and I love it. Import from several recipe-sharing sites works very well. Import from Instagram would be great, but Meta tries to make this as hard as possible.
I’ve been using One Note. I had the same issues you had with paper and recipe cards and I happened to be using MS office a lot in general. It’s handy since I can use it from my phone or laptop and can share with family. I copy internet recipes to One Note since they can be available offline and since sometimes recipes on random sites disappear.
Converting to something I can self host would be cool.
I don’t think I’d ever use meal planning and shopping list features. It would be nice to have an easy way to generate nutrition info for my invented or modified recipes.
Oh, and I do like flipping through cookbooks for ideas. When I see something I like in a cookbook, I use my phone to scan it into One Note.
It can be a little awkward flipping between recipes when I’m making multiple things from recipes at the same time. My setup is good enough but not great
I’m currently using AnyList, a combined grocery list and recipe app, to store everything.
Should that ever shut down, I’d probably move everything over to Notion.
Same here. Recently started using the meal planning option as well to track everything and its been great
I use Copy Me That because it’s easy to quickly save recipes from the phone without having to do any formatting, but I’ve now run into an issue of having too many recipes that I’ve never actually made lol.
I think I might try to use one of the other methods mentioned here to collate my tried and true recipes into a digital cookbook and continue to use the app for archiving things to try.
These days, just google docs.
If I see an interesting recipe online, I’ll rewrite it without all the fluff and discussion, in a standalone document I can have up on my phone while I cook.
If it’s deemed worthy, I stick it into the master document, called ‘how to make food’ - a document I have shared with my 17yo.
Same. I copy and paste the recipe from the website and cut out any fluff.
I have a recipe folder on drive that’s further decided by meal type (dinner, breakfast, sides & snacks, desserts, etc.). The dinner folder (biggest) also has subfolders for meat types (chicken, pork, veg, etc.).
I usually have everything sorted by when I last opened it, to try and keep a fresh rotation. The recipe folder has a permanent link on our tablet that lives in the kitchen.
This works great, because I can share a recipe pretty quickly if I’m talking about it with someone. Also other family members can open the folder on the tablet and start or help with meal prep.
3 ring binder. When I find a new recipe I print it out. If my family likes it then I get out the hole punch and it goes in the binder.
I use ones from recipe books. I like that the recipe is in a book because
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The screen doesn’t turn off when I’m cooking.
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The recipe usually fits on a page, so I don’t need to touch it after I start.
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I can scribble my modifications on it with a pencil.
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I mark the good ones with torn up bits of paper sticking out.
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I like having a bunch of recipe books around. Most of them were gifts, so cooking from them reminds me of who I got them from.
I’ve tried bookmarks to websites, copying recipes to Google Docs/Keep. It feels like work. Worse, when I’m cooking, I need a way to keep my phone/tablet screen on. I’m usually listening to a podcast or using a timer on my phone, so then I need to switch apps, etc.
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I just have a page in Notion for food and recipes. Gets backed up to the cloud and I can check it on other devices if I need to. I care about the markdown editor more then recipe specific features in an app.
I use OneNote and have a notebook on the for recipes then I just have listings for baking, cooking, desserts, breads, etc. Keeping it digitally means I can also add in my own notes/tips for the next time I make it. Also being able to include links and images makes it handy for quick reference.
I keep my recipes in a git repo formatted with markdown and pushed to GitHub.
It is easy to view on a phone or tablet, I have a history of changes I make over time, and it’s easy to share with other people.
Any new recipes I find online I can usually edit fairly quick and add it to the repo so I don’t have to scroll through someones family history and how it relates to some dish every time I want to make it.
It’s very much the solution of a programmer, but it works well for me.
Directory of plaintext files.
I love cookmate. There’s an ad free version that I happily pay something nominal annually ($20?)
The import from website works the vast majority of the time (sometimes you gotta fiddle the steps getting condensed to one or something), the screen stays on while the app is up and it has a lot of custom tags/categories that’s helpful when meal prepping. Been using for at least the last five years and I’m a pretty active cook/baker - I use it just about every time I’m referencing a recipe
I have a neocities website for my recipes. I save each recipe as a text file and use a custom script to render the recipe page html and generate an index.
Used to store them on Google Keep, but things were getting too messy there. I’ve been gradually moving things over to Notion. So far, it’s working a lot better in some respects (better organization with their tables and formatting options), but also worse in others (Notion app and website is way heavier than Keep). Would love to hear about better options, especially since I don’t trust them to stay alive for as long I want all this data to stay alive.
