Can I save multiple versions of the same recipe?

Yes. Drizzlelemons now lets you save unlimited named versions of any recipe in your collection. Each version sits alongside the original — Weeknight, Dinner party, Catering, Vegan, or any name you choose. Switch between versions from a tab row at the top of the recipe page.

How do professional chefs track recipe iterations digitally?

The most effective approach is a system that keeps the original recipe immutable and stores each variation as a named sibling rather than a forked copy. Drizzlelemons is built around this model: every variation has its own ingredients, method, cooking time, and a private 5,000-character note, all synced across devices. Working chefs use it to manage scaled service versions, dietary adaptations, seasonal swaps, and R&D iterations of the same dish.

Can I scale a recipe for catering without losing the original?

Yes. Save your base recipe once and create a catering version as a sibling. Adjust the servings, rewrite the method for batch quantities, and add holding-temperature notes — the original remains untouched. You can return to the home version any time by tapping the original tab.

How do I adapt a recipe for a dietary restriction and keep both versions?

Edit the recipe and save it as a new version with a descriptive name like Gluten-free or Dairy-free. Both the original and the adapted version live on the same recipe page, accessible via the tab row. You can build as many dietary variants as you need without duplicating files.

Are private chef notes synced across devices?

Yes. Each version carries a private note of up to 5,000 characters, attached only to your account. Notes sync between every device you sign in on, so the note you wrote while developing a dish at home is the same note you see on a tablet at the pass.

Does creating a recipe version cost anything?

No. Versioning is free. Lemons — the Drizzlelemons credit system — are used only to add a brand-new recipe to your collection or to use the AI features. Every version you create from a recipe you already own, every edit, and every private note is unlimited and uncounted.

Recipe Versioning for Professional Chefs: Develop, Scale, and Track Every Iteration

May 2026

Professional kitchens have always needed a way to track the same dish across variants — scaled for service, adapted for a dietary restriction, refined over a season. Until now, that work has lived in moleskines, photocopied folders, and shared drives full of files named lemon-chicken-FINAL-v3-actually-final.docx. Drizzlelemons now treats recipe versioning as a first-class feature. Every recipe in your collection can carry an unlimited number of named versions alongside the original — switchable from a tab row at the top of the page, synced across every device you sign into, and free to create.

This is the feature working chefs have been asking us for since we launched. It is also the piece that turns Drizzlelemons from a clean recipe viewer into a recipe development system you can run a kitchen from.

What "versions" actually means

A version is a named variant of an existing recipe that lives alongside the original, not on top of it. Save a base recipe — your trusted lemon chicken, your house pasta dough, the curry the regulars ask for by name — and every variant you build sits as a sibling. The original stays exactly as you saved it. The variants get their own ingredient lists, methods, cooking times, titles, and a private note that only you can see.

Four things matter about the model:

The original is immutable. You can not accidentally write over the version you have been cooking for ten years by tweaking it for one service. Editing the original creates the first version automatically.
Versions are siblings, not forks. Every variant points back to one original. There is no version of a version. The model stays flat and legible — easy to scan when you have eight variants of the same dish.
You name them. Versions are not v1, v2, v3. They are Weeknight, Dinner party, Catering ×20, Vegan, Low-FODMAP, February batch. The name is what shows up in the tab row.
They sync across devices. Develop a version on a laptop in the office, pull it up on the line from a tablet, cook from it on a phone at a private event. The same version, the same private note, everywhere you sign in.

Click the recipe in your collection and you see the original by default. Tap a version tab and the page rewrites with that variant — ingredients, method, timing, and note. One tap to compare; one tap to switch back.

Why working chefs needed this

Most recipe apps were built for the home cook who wants one good way to make a dish. Professional kitchens have a different problem. The same dish has to flex.

Scaling to service. The home version of the dish serves four. Tonight you are doing sixty. A recipe scaler gets you most of the way there, but not every ingredient scales linearly — salt, leavening, spices, cooking times — and the version you cook at sixty covers includes specific changes you do not want to redo from scratch every Friday.
Client and guest dietary work. A booking comes in with two coeliacs, one dairy-free, one nut allergy. You do not want to overwrite the original recipe — you want the gluten-free version, the dairy-free version, and the nut-free version sitting one tab away from the base, ready to pull up on the day.
Seasonal swaps. The summer version of the salad uses peaches; the autumn version uses figs; the winter version uses blood orange. Same backbone, three variants. The old way is three near-identical PDFs. The new way is three tabs.
R&D iterations. You are tightening a new dish. Last week's version used a 24-hour brine; this week's is dry-cured for 48. You want to keep both side by side until you decide. Overwriting the file destroys the comparison.
Catering and event one-offs. A specific brief — corporate lunch for eighty, vegan, no aubergine — needs a version, not a permanent change to your house recipe.

Every one of these used to be a copy-paste problem. Duplicate the recipe document, rename it, edit the duplicate, lose track of which file is current, end up cooking from a printout that does not match what is in the digital folder. Versioning collapses the whole workflow into one record.

A worked example: lemon chicken across three versions

Say you have a lemon chicken recipe you have refined over a few years. It is your base. You save it to Drizzlelemons. Now you build three versions of it.

Version 1 — Weeknight. Four servings, thirty minutes. You cut the marinade time from overnight to thirty minutes, swap the confit garlic for a quick garlic oil, drop the pangrattato that no one at home has the patience for, and add a private note: "Tuesday version — uses bottled lemon juice if fresh is out."

Version 2 — Dinner party. Six servings, plated. The marinade goes back to overnight. The pangrattato returns. You add a fennel and orange salad as a method step. You bump the lemon zest because the dish needs more acid against the salad. Private note: "Plate in shallow bowls. Garnish with reserved fennel fronds. Pairs with the Frappato we had last time."

Version 3 — Catering ×20. Twenty covers, banquet service. Marinade scaled non-linearly (less lemon per kilo than the home version because of carry-over from the pan). Cooking time adjusted for hotel-pan capacity. Method rewritten in batches. You include a holding instruction not in the original. Private note: "Hold at 65°C for max 25 minutes. After that the chicken dries. Brought back from the May event."

All three versions sit on the same recipe page. The original is still there, untouched. When a regular asks what changed since last winter, you can answer the question because the previous winter version is still in the tab row.

The chef's notebook: private notes per version

Every version carries a private note of up to 5,000 characters. It is the lab-notebook layer that recipe apps almost never have. The note is yours alone — it is not shared if someone else views a recipe, it is not part of the ingredient list, it does not show up in the cooking view. It is the page in the margin.

Working cooks already keep this kind of note somewhere. Photos of moleskine pages. A Notes app on a phone the rest of the kitchen cannot see. Voice memos. The point of putting it on the recipe itself is that the note lives with the version it describes, not in a separate place that has to be cross-referenced.

Useful things to put in there:

What changed and why. "Reduced lemon by ½ — March batch was too acidic against the cream."
Service notes. "Pass with sauce on the side. Two regulars do not take it."
Source acknowledgements. "Confit garlic technique from Helen Goh's column, July 2023."
Pairings. "Works with the Etna Bianco. Do not pair with anything oaked."
Plating diagrams in text. "Centre, then sauce around. Fennel fronds at 2 and 8 o'clock."
Allergen flags. "Contains pine nuts in the pangrattato. Sub almond flakes for nut-free events."
Cost notes. "Costing as of May 2026: £4.20 per cover at fish prices. Recheck if turbot."

Notes sync to your account, so the version you developed at home is the same version — same note — that you pull up at the pass.

How to develop a recipe across versions

Save the base recipe. Paste a URL into Drizzlelemons or use the Chrome extension to capture an existing recipe in one click. If you are starting from a paper recipe, you can type the original directly into the form. This becomes your immutable base.
Open the recipe and click Edit. The first time you edit, Drizzlelemons creates Version 1 automatically. The original stays as it was — you are now working in a sibling.
Name the version. Use a name that describes the variant — Weeknight, Service ×40, Coeliac, February — not a number. The name is what appears in the tab row.
Adjust ingredients and method. Edit quantities, units, ingredient groups, and method steps. Add or remove lines as needed. Update cooking time. The form lets you make every change inline without retyping the whole recipe.
Write the private note. Capture the why — what you changed, what to watch for, what to do differently next time. This is the layer you will thank yourself for in six months.
Repeat. The next variation gets its own version. Tab between them from the row at the top of the recipe.

How it fits with the rest of Drizzlelemons

Versions plug into every other part of the product.

Saved collection and search. Versions live under their parent recipe in your organised collection. Search and favourites work as before — you are not adding clutter to the list.
This Week meal planner. Add a specific version to the This Week queue when you are planning service or a private event. The plan picks up the version you chose, not the original.
Smart shopping list. The merged grocery list uses the ingredients from the version you planned, with that version's servings. Scale the catering version to twenty and the order list reflects it.
Cook Mode. Cook Mode runs from whichever version is active. Open the dinner-party variant, hit Cook Mode, and the step-by-step view with built-in timers walks you through that specific build, not the home one.
AI customization. The existing AI dietary adaptation still works. Use it to seed a new vegan or gluten-free version, then refine it manually — best of both layers.

What it costs

Versioning is free. Lemons — Drizzlelemons' credit system — are used only when you add a brand-new recipe to your collection, generate a recipe from scratch with AI, or use the AI dietary rewrite. Every version you create from a recipe you already own, every edit you make, every note you write, is unlimited and uncounted. You will not run a meter while you iterate.

For working cooks who are likely to build many variants of the same handful of dishes, this is the only billing model that makes sense.

Privacy and ownership

Versions are private to your account. Private notes are private to you — they do not appear when a recipe is shared with a public link, they are not visible to anyone else who saves the same recipe, and they are not part of the recipe's structured data. If you share a recipe, the share is the version you choose to share; everything else stays where it lives.

Start building your library

If you are a chef, a recipe developer, a private cook, a caterer, a food writer, or anyone whose work means cooking the same dish more than once and slightly differently each time — this is what we built for you. The bookmark folder, the desktop full of duplicated documents, the printout with crossings-out and arrows: those can come into one place that respects how recipe work actually happens.

Open Drizzlelemons, save your first recipe, and create a version →

Saving recipes is free. Editing is free. Versioning is free. Lemons exist for the parts where AI does the work; the rest of the product is unlimited for as long as you keep cooking.