How do you organize your recipes?

Before working on any food blog design, I first look at how recipes are currently organized and/or how the food blogger wants to reorganize them.

Imagine that pantry makeover video

You know the kind: the professional organizer wanders into the pantry and scans the camera around to see a chaotic mess. A plan is made, containers purchased, pretty labels applied, and then everything is pulled out onto the floor. What’s old or of no use is thrown out. Long forgotten things are rediscovered. Similar goods are bundled together into one basket. Packets are emptied into new canisters. Finally, everything is put back into the pantry in a whole new system. (Presumably to stay that way forever… until the next reorganization is needed.)

Without someone guiding you through the process, the pantry clean-up job can be pushed way down the to-do list. It can feel rather daunting!

But the end result is worth it. The space looks and feels great. Most importantly, you find the food item you’re looking for without effort.

The same process applies to organizing recipes

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve built up a decent collection of recipes. Categories and tags can be used in a haphazard way and easily become an overwhelming, cluttered mess. It’s time for a strategic makeover.

The way your recipes are organized needs to make sense for your readers and their needs which are specific to the type of recipe blog you’ve created. And, it needs to be a system that’s sustainable for you — one where you clearly know how to organize recipes to keep things tidy in the future too.

Ways of organizing recipes

There are so many different ways of organizing recipes that it can feel overwhelming. There’s no need to use all of them and you’ll need to have enough recipes in each category to make it worthwhile for them to use. Think about your readers’ needs, the focus of your blog, the types of recipes that you post, and the number of recipes that you have.

A simple way would be to use Type, Course, and Diet.

Here’s a list covering many of the ways that recipes are organized:

Main Ingredient

e.g. beef, chicken, egg, pasta.

Ingredient

e.g. apple, apricot, asparagus, avocado

Type

e.g. curry, pizza, soup, bread

Course

e.g. breakfast, lunch, appetizer, dinner

Season

e.g. spring, summer, fall, winter

Holiday/Occasion

e.g. Christmas, Easter, Game Day, Thanksgiving

Style

e.g. healthy, comfort, family-friendly, party

Technique/Method

e.g. bake, barbecue, grill, preserve

Diet

e.g. vegan, vegetarian, paleo, dairy-free

Cuisine

e.g. Asian, French, Indian, Mexican

Cost

e.g. $, $$, $$$, or Budget

Difficulty

e.g. basic, intermediate, advanced

Time

e.g. < 10 minutes, 11-30 minutes, 31-60 minutes, > 1 hour

Popularity

e.g. highest-rated, most pinned, author favorites, most commented, trending

Equipment

e.g. instant pot, slow cooker, thermomix, magic bullet

Organizing Recipes Workbook

I’ve created an organizing recipes workbook, which takes you through the next steps once you’ve selected the ways that you’ll organize your recipes. It also includes a master list of the top 200 most frequently used ingredients pulled from approximately 60,000 recipes at AllRecipes.com.

It’s like wandering into a pantry to see how all the shelves are organized, making a plan, then pulling everything out onto the floor