How to Organize Your Recipes So you'll never lose a recipe AGAIN

Keeping recipes organized can be a pain in the bootay. It’s so annoying when you can’t find what you need, it gets messed up in the kitchen, and everything is everywhere. I’ve put together some pretty genius recipe organization ideas that will show exactly how to organize your recipes so you can have some peace of mind.

We’ll be going over organizing loose recipes and how to organize your recipes digitally so that you can find the best way to store your recipes that works perfectly for YOU!

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Recipe Organization Categories

The first thing you are going to want to do before you start organizing is to separate your recipes by category. In the long run, this is going to help you so much when it comes to finding the exact recipe you need when you need it, so you don’t have to spend an excessive amount of time looking for the recipe you need.

Here are some of the most common recipe organization categories and subcategories that you can use if they fit your cooking habits!

Breakfast
- Quick and Easy
- Bulk breakfast (for meal prepping & freezing)
- Weekend Breakfast
Lunch
Side dishes
Dinner
- Chicken
- Pork
- Seafood
- Beef
- Italian
- Mexican
- Oriental Cuisine
Dessert
Snacks
Appetizers
Holidays
- Halloween
- Thanksgiving
- Christmas
- Easter
Drinks
- Alcoholic
- Non-alcoholic
Entertaining
Soups & Salads

What is the best way to organize recipes?

The way you organize your recipes comes down to what works best and comes easiest for you.

If you’ve been cooking for a long time and have a lot of loose recipes, retyping them and organizing them in a binder will probably be best.

If you are new to cooking and don’t have very many recipes in your possession, it may work best for you to start organizing your recipes electronically!

How to Organize Loose Recipes

How to organize loose recipes in a binder

Binder recipe organization is probably the most common way to organize your recipes. But even those can get out of hand. Here’s how to organize a recipe binder that actually stays organized:

Step 1: Grab a binder

You can opt for a simple and plain binder, or get a cute one specifically made for recipes.

Shop binders below!

Step 2: Get page dividers

If your binder doesn’t already have them, getting page dividers will separate all of your recipe categories so that you can flip to them without having to go through all of your recipes!

Step 3: Put your recipes in sheet protectors

It’s no secret that the kitchen can get pretty messy so you want to make sure that your recipes are protected from potential spills or messy hands with sheet protectors.

Step 4: Organize your recipes

Now that you’ve gotten the structure and flow of your recipe binder together, it’s time to organize your recipes! I recommend structuring your page dividers by which category you use from most often to least often.

Use recipe cards

If you are a pan of handwritten recipes, recipe cards are a great way to store your recipes! You can opt for index card recipe cards or full-sized recipe cards depending on your preferences.

With the index card size, you can store them in a cute recipe box right on your counter. The full-sized cards will work great in a recipe binder.

Shop recipe cards below!

Free Printable Recipe Cards

Accordion file system

For this recipe organization method, you’ll need an accordion file organizer and tab dividers if your file organizer doesn’t already come with them. Write each recipe category you will be using on the tab labels and you’ll be all set. Shop accordion files below!

Best Way to Organize Recipes Digitally 2021

If you are over the traditional paper recipe organization method or you simply don’t have any paper recipes, organizing your recipes digitally is the way to go. Here are some of the best (and easiest ways to organize your recipes digitally!

Pinterest recipe organization

For all of my Pinterest recipe lovers, the easiest way to organize your recipes is by simply making boards for each recipe category that you have.

If that seems overwhelming, try making a new Pinterest account dedicated to recipes so your boards aren’t jumbled up with any other boards you may have.

I like this method because any time you are looking for a recipe, you can actually SEE exactly what it looks like!

Upload recipes to Google Docs

Here are a few different ways to organize your recipes with Google Docs/Google Drive.

Method #1: Copy and paste

You can simply copy and paste any recipe you find online into Google Docs and title the document either the name of the recipe or you can do one category per doc that you can open and have your recipes on different pages within the doc.

Method #2: Print to your Google Drive

Print the website page like you would normally print (typically file -> print or command P), and print the recipe as a PDF to the destination email address that your Google Drive is set up with. You can even select exactly what pages you want to print!

OrganizEat

OrganizEat is an amazing free app in the App Store (not 100% sure if it’s available for Android) that keeps recipes for you.

The app allows you to 1.) take pictures of your recipes to upload 2.) Save recipes directly from their website 3.) Make meal plans 4.) Write notes about each recipe.

As you can probably tell, you can seriously do EVERYTHING with this app!

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