Where is the best place to store your favorite recipes?

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

I love cooking, I guess that’s granted.

One other fetish I have is cooking blogs, cooking books, and old family cooking recipes. This is where I get my inspiration from. I try to cook something new every day, to keep my (and my family’s) taste buds open to new adventures.

Over the years I tried different solutions for the always asked question of “where to keep your recipes?”. I finally believe I have found the perfect solution, for me at least though I assume it will fit 90% of other recipe lovers also. If you wish to cut to the chase, my recommendation is, by far, use Evernote for your recipe collections, and for many other tasks also!

To be clear, I do not work for Evernote, nor do I get any benefit from them by recommending their application here. I truly believe it is the best solution and I will explain why in this post. However before I will get to my conclusion and talk about Evernote, let me explore some of the other tools/methods I’ve tried and what I liked and didn’t like about them.

At first, when I just started looking online for recipes, I used to save my favorites ones as “Favorites” in my browser “Favorites” tab. While this is OK for someone who only cooks at home, and which has up to a couple dozens favorites recipes, the cooking savvy person will quickly find that managing this way does not scale, search is very limited, there is no way to reach it from other devices, and no way to share the recipes with friends/family.

Then I moved to having a folder in my gmail account for recipes, and I emailed myself when I found one I liked and moved it to the relevant folder. This was better than the “Favorites” tab option as it is accessible online from any device, easier to search and to share, however searching is only text based, and what I like a lot about food recipes online is the gorgeous pictures, which make you want to cook the dishes in the first place. So I was looking for a more visual solution.

So I searched around and found there are dozens of online applications one can choose from to do just what I was looking for. After excluding the paid ones, I did some research with about 5 online tools/applications for recipe management, and after signing up for some of them I sicked with Springpad which I felt was the easiest to use, had nice visual menu that i was fancying, and was able to manage other languages, as I am interested in English as well as Hebrew online recipes. I used Springpad for a few months and was quite happy, until one day they sent an email saying they are closing their site and services, and all users should migrate to other solutions. This was a real bummer to me as I allready collected quite a few dozens recipes, organized them in a manner I liked, and have grown acustomed to using Springpad. The good thing about this though, was that they included an easy migration tool, to, yeah you guessed it, Evernote!

And that’s how I started using Evernote, and found out that it is so much better than any other special online recipe management application. I must admit that I did have a previous experience with Evernote a few years prior to this, but I wasn’t that impressed or excited by it so didn’t stick with it. On the Springpad closing occasion, I gave it a dipper look, and had some nice girl on Facebook actually help me get familiarize with some features, and I just fell in love with it.

With regards to recipes, it has everything I would imagine from a recipe application:

Visual appearance for the recipes:

Search by words in the title or body of a note, or by tags you pre-configured:

It is accessible from your mobile smartphone, or online (application on your PC or web on public PCs).

You can easily share recipes or whole notebooks with others. Special bonus those others don’t have to have Evernote installed to watch what you send them. You can choose if you wish others to just view your notes, or also edit them:

It has a cool web clipper function that let’s you clip right from the page you are visiting:

You could also just copy and paste a page URL to a new note in order to keep it.

You can annotate any picture on the recipe, as well as edit the text after you have a recipe stored in a note. A good usage for that is if you used a recipe, but changed one of the ingredients and it turned out better, you can just write a comment to yourself next to it.

It has a recording option where you can record yourself and save it.

It is also good for writing your recipes and general ideas, just open a new note and start writing.

And you could also use it to store old family recipes, from the hard copy type: just take a picture of them with your phone, and save those pictures into Evernote.

It also has many features that application specific for recipes management do not have, which make it superior to them:

It is great for offline usages. A good example is my mother and father in law who traveled to Japan and wanted to avoid the expensive roaming costs for mobile phones. So they scanned the maps and all the data they needed into notes, and they accessed it offline on their mobiles while abroad.

It can be used for much much more than recipes: Any idea you need available to you can be stored on Evernote. Some example of Notebooks I have:

Attractions with kids, Treks abroad, Order from Amazon, Kids games ideas, Baking stores, Doctors I like, Kids daycare, Home stuff, Restaurants to try, and much more..

You can add a reminder for any note (say if a certain food blogger wishes her husband to buy her the new Garmin running watch for her Bday she can schedule a reminder for a few days before and email him that note with some subtle hints).

So, if you didn’t notice yet, I am loving my Evernote, and am recommending it for everyone, for your recipes management, as well as all your personal notes.

I would add one note here though, if you did choose to use Evernote (good for you !), when you revisit any of your notes that ae from a web page (be that a blog post or any other kind), I do recommend you actually use the saved link and go back to the original web page, as often web pages would get updated and you would want to catch the latest (an example in recipes is where the author made a mistake and fixed it, or someone made an interesting variation to a dish and shared it in the comments, etc.)

Share your thoughts in the comments!

Moran