Printable Recipe Page (Free PDF)

This is the sheet for the recipes you cook often enough to file. A band across the top holds serves, prep time, cook time, total time and the oven temperature, so the numbers you need before you start are all in one place rather than buried in a paragraph. Under it the page splits: 29 ruled ingredient lines on the left, 18 numbered method steps on the right, each step two lines deep. A notes band at the foot takes substitutions, tin sizes and what you would change next time.

Writing a recipe out this way makes gaps obvious. If a step has no matching ingredient, or an ingredient never gets used, you see it while you copy rather than halfway through cooking. The source line at the top is worth filling in too: the book, the website or the person it came from. On A4 the columns grow to 32 ingredient lines and 20 steps, because the page is taller.

Every line is a real form field, so a recipe dictated over the phone can be typed straight in and printed, and a sheet printed blank works just as well with a pen. Print one copy per recipe, punch it for a ring binder, and slip it into a plastic sleeve if it is going to live near the hob. One page, US Letter or A4.