A recipe table template you can copy

There is no official template for the recipe summary table, because the grid is different for every recipe — the layout is the recipe. But the structure that generates it fits on an index card, and this page is that card.

Start from this skeleton, in a spreadsheet or on paper:

• One row per ingredient, with its quantity in the leftmost cell. Order them by when each is first used, not how your cupboard is arranged — this is the step everyone skips and the reason most attempts fail.
• One column per step, left to right in cooking order. Write the action in the cell (“cream”, “fold in”, “bake 35 min”).
• Merge a step's cell across exactly the rows it acts on. Once ingredients are combined, they travel together: every later step that touches the mixture spans all of their rows.
• The final column spans every row.If it doesn't, an ingredient never made it into the dish — which is the format quietly proofreading your recipe.

Glazed carrots, the smallest recipe that shows a merge. Three ingredients: carrots, butter, honey. Three steps: simmer the carrots in water; melt the butter with the honey; toss everything together over heat until glazed.

The table: carrotstake row one, with “simmer 10 min” as a cell on just that row. Butter and honeytake rows two and three, and “melt together” is one cell spanning both — that span is the merge. The last column, “toss until glazed”, spans all three rows: everything has become one dish. Read it back and the whole method is visible in one look, including the fact that two things happen in parallel.

Any spreadsheet can do this — merge cells is the only feature you need. For the rules in more depth, see how to format a recipe as a table; for reading unfamiliar ones, how to read a recipe table.

One table is a pleasant puzzle. The trouble is that the two hard steps — reordering ingredients by first use, and working out which cells span what — have to be redone from scratch for every recipe. Michael Chu, who invented the format in 2004, drew each of his by hand, and in twenty years that discipline produced a few hundred tables. It is why the format stayed rare.

RecipeTables does the reordering and the spanning automatically: paste a link, the text, or a photo of a cookbook page, and the finished table comes back in about fifteen seconds — scalable, translatable, and printable. The template above is still worth knowing; it is what the tool is doing on your behalf.

Browse a few hundred finished tables to see how the template plays out across real recipes.