How to Keep Track of Recipes You've Tried
September 22, 2026
Count the places you keep recipes. A browser folder. Screenshots of Instagram posts. A saved-videos tab. Two or three cookbooks bristling with sticky tabs. A newsletter you starred. Maybe a card in someone else's handwriting.
Now try to answer a simple question about any of them: have you actually made it? And if you have, was it good?
For most of those saves, you won't know. That's the gap this piece is about, and it has surprisingly little to do with how the recipes are stored.
Saved, tried, and worth repeating
A saved recipe is a hope. You saw a photo of miso-glazed eggplant and thought: I'd like to make that. Saving costs one tap, which is why the pile grows so fast.
A tried recipe is a fact. On a particular evening you made it, and something happened. The glaze caught, or it didn't. Everyone ate it, or two people had cereal afterwards.
A recipe worth repeating is a judgment, and it's the only one of the three you'd actually want on a busy weeknight with a hungry household.
Bookmark folders and recipe apps are built around the first state. They're good at saving and sorting. The second and third states usually live nowhere, or in your head, which amounts to the same thing after a couple of months.
Leave the recipe where it lives
The instinct is to consolidate: move everything into one app, retype the cookbook recipes, download the videos. It feels like getting organized. In practice it's a large project that stalls halfway, and it solves the wrong problem.
You don't need a copy of the recipe. You need a record of your experience with it, and a way to get from that record back to the source. A page number does that. So does a link, or "the creator with the green kitchen, the one where she uses frozen spinach."
Keep the instructions wherever they already are. Keep the history somewhere you'll look.
What to record when you try something
Right after you've made a saved recipe for the first time, write down enough to answer three questions later.
Where is it? Book and page, link, or a description good enough to search for.
What happened? A sentence on how it turned out and how it went down. "Braised white beans from the Saturday paper. Too thin; needed another twenty minutes uncovered. Good with the bread, ignored by the kids."
Would you make it again? Yes, no, or yes-if. The yes-ifs are the interesting ones: "yes, with half the chili," "yes, but only on a weekend." They're the start of the notes that make the second attempt better than the first.
Three lines is enough. If you already keep a cooking journal, this is simply what a first-time recipe looks like in it.
Marking the source itself
It helps to leave a trace on the original too, so you recognize a tried recipe when you stumble on it again.
With a cookbook, a pencil date in the corner of the page is enough. Swap the sticky tab for a different color once you've made it. With saved links, a second folder called "made" does more than any clever tagging system. Screenshots and videos are the hardest, because they can't carry a note; for those, the record you keep elsewhere is doing all the work.
The second attempt
The first time you make a recipe you're following instructions. The second time you're following instructions plus whatever you learned, and that's the attempt most likely to be lost, because the lesson from the first try has usually evaporated by then.
So when a tried recipe comes around again, read your note first. Then add to it. After a few rounds the note starts to matter more than the source, and you may find you've drifted into a version of the dish that's really your own.
What about the recipes you'll never make?
Every collection has a long tail of saves that will never be cooked. That's fine. Saving was cheap and the aspiration was real.
But it helps to stop treating the pile as a to-do list. The useful list is the short one: the recipes you've made and would make again. It tends to stay small, and it's worth far more than the thousand saves around it, for the reasons we got into in why we forget what we cooked.
Keeping the history in MealEncore
MealEncore doesn't try to hold your recipes. The cookbook stays on the shelf and the link stays in your browser. What it holds is the other half: after you cook, you say what you made and how it went, and it keeps that, along with what each person at the table thought.
It also keeps the three states apart. A dish you want to try can sit on a short list of ideas, where it doesn't count as anything yet. Once you've cooked something more than once and told MealEncore those entries are the same dish, the earlier attempts sit together, ready to read before you start the next one.
Get on the early-access list →
Or keep a notebook next to the cookbooks. The method works either way; the point is that the history exists somewhere.