How to Organize Recipes: Search, Sort & Favorites

February 2026

You saved 30 recipes last month. Now you need that one chicken stir-fry you found on a Tuesday. Good luck scrolling through an unsorted list trying to remember if you saved it two weeks ago or three.

A recipe collection is only useful if you can find things in it. That is the difference between a recipe organizer and a graveyard of bookmarks: real tools for searching, sorting, and surfacing the recipes you actually cook.

Drizzlelemons just shipped a set of features that make organizing recipes online genuinely fast. Here is what changed and how to use each one.

Why Most Recipe Collections Become a Mess

The pattern is always the same. You find a great recipe, save it somewhere, and feel productive. A month later you have 50 saved recipes and no way to navigate them. You end up scrolling, squinting at titles, trying to remember which one was the quick pasta and which one was the three-hour braise.

Most digital recipe organizers give you a place to save recipes but skip the tools you need once the collection grows. No search. No sort. No way to mark which recipes you actually cook every week versus the ones you saved on impulse. Drizzlelemons now has all of these.

Search Your Entire Recipe Collection Instantly

There is a search bar at the top of your recipe collection. Type a word and your recipes filter in real time. It searches across recipe titles and source websites, so you can search "chicken", "bbcgoodfood", or "pasta" and find what you need immediately.

Search works within whichever category tab you have selected. So if you are on the Dinner tab and search "soup", you see only dinner soups — not the butternut squash soup you filed under Lunch. This means you can narrow down large collections in two moves: pick a category, then search.

Sort Recipes by Date, Name, or Cooking Time

Next to the search bar there is a sort dropdown with five options:

• Recently added — newest first, the default. Useful for finding recipes you saved this week.
• Oldest first — for rediscovering recipes buried at the bottom of your collection.
• A to Z — alphabetical. Helpful when you know the recipe name but not when you saved it.
• Z to A — reverse alphabetical.
• Quickest — sorts by cooking time, shortest first. This is the one you want on a busy weeknight when you need dinner in 20 minutes.

Your sort preference is saved automatically. Pick "Quickest" once and it stays that way until you change it — even after refreshing the page or coming back the next day.

Favorite the Recipes You Cook Most

Every recipe now has a heart icon. Tap it and that recipe is marked as a favorite. There is a dedicated Favorites tab at the top of your collection that shows only your favorited recipes.

This solves the "I saved 80 recipes but only cook 12 of them" problem. Your go-to meals stay one tap away. No scrolling, no searching — just your best recipes, front and center.

Favorites sync to your account, so they persist across devices. Favorite a recipe on your laptop while meal planning on Sunday, then find it on your phone in the kitchen on Wednesday.

Switch Between Grid View and List View

Your recipe collection now has two viewing modes, toggled by the icons next to the sort dropdown:

• List view — the original compact layout. Each recipe is a horizontal card showing the title, cooking time, and source. Fits the most recipes on screen. Best for quickly scanning a long list.
• Grid view — tall vertical cards with recipe images front and center. Makes your collection feel more visual and browsable, similar to how recipe apps like Paprika and Mela display saved recipes. Best for browsing when you are not sure what you want to cook.

Like your sort preference, the view mode is saved. Choose grid once and it stays until you switch back.

How These Features Work Together

Each feature is useful on its own, but they compound when combined. Here is a real example:

It is Tuesday evening. You have 45 minutes. You open your recipe collection, switch to the Dinner tab, and sort by "Quickest". Now you are looking at your fastest dinner recipes. You search "chicken" to narrow it further. There are three options. You pick the one with the heart — your favorite — and start cooking. Total time spent deciding: about five seconds.

Compare that to the old workflow: scrolling through a flat list of 60 recipes, trying to remember which ones are fast and which are slow. The new tools turn a frustrating hunt into an instant answer.

If you have not started building your recipe collection yet, it takes about 10 seconds per recipe: paste a URL into the recipe converter, and Drizzlelemons extracts a clean, ad-free version with ingredients and instructions. Once saved, all of these organization tools are immediately available.

New Category Tabs: Favorites and Sides

Along with the organizational tools, there are two new category tabs:

• Favorites — shows only the recipes you have hearted. This is the fastest way to get to your rotation meals.
• Sides — a new meal-type category for side dishes, salads, and accompaniments. Previously, sides had to live under another category. Now they have their own tab.

Each tab shows a count of how many recipes it contains, which updates as you search and filter. So you can see at a glance that you have 8 dinner recipes matching "chicken" or 3 favorited breakfast recipes.

Frequently Asked Questions