Recipes and batch recipes
Stock & Recipes is an add-on. See What's included, and what's an add-on.
What this is for
A recipe links a menu item to the ingredients it uses. Sell the dish, and those ingredients come out of stock.
It's also where dish costing comes from. Once a recipe exists, you know what that plate costs you — and therefore what you're actually making on it.
Writing a recipe
- Go to Inventory › Recipes › Add Recipe.
- Select Menu Item — the dish being sold.
- Select Variation if it has sizes. Each variation gets its own recipe, because a large portion isn't a small one.
- Add Ingredient for each component: pick the Ingredient, enter the Quantity and its Unit.
- Save.
The Ingredients Cost is calculated for you as you build it.
Getting the quantities right
This is the part that decides whether any of it is worth anything.
- Weigh a real portion. Once, properly, with scales. What the chef says it is and what goes on the plate are different numbers.
- Include everything that moves. Oil, butter, garnish, the sauce. Small items are how food cost quietly runs away.
- Use the yield, not the purchase weight. If you buy salmon whole and lose 40% to trim, the recipe should reflect what actually reaches the plate — either enter the trimmed quantity and account for waste separately, or hold a prepared item that already carries the loss.
- Match the unit to the item. A recipe in grams against an item held in kilograms is a conversion waiting to be got wrong.
Which dishes to write first
Not all of them. In order:
- Your top sellers. Volume is where cost concentrates.
- Your most expensive ingredients. The steak matters more than the bread roll.
- Anything you suspect is losing money.
Twenty recipes covering most of your covers is a genuinely useful system. Two hundred half-finished ones aren't.
Batch recipes
Some things aren't made per order. Stock, sauces, dough, chai, a marinade — made in quantity, then served from over days.
A batch recipe models that.
Setting one up
Inventory › Batch Recipes › Add Batch Recipe:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | e.g. Masala Chai, Tomato Sugo, Pizza Dough. |
| Description | Optional. |
| Yield Unit | What the batch is measured in — litres, kg. |
| Default Batch Size | How much one production run makes. |
| Default Expiry Days | How long it keeps. |
| Ingredients | Inventory items and quantities consumed per batch. |
Producing a batch
Produce Batch runs it: ingredients come out of stock, and batch stock goes in.
Before it runs, Restodesk checks you have the ingredients and warns if you don't — showing what's required against what's available, item by item. You can't quietly produce a batch out of stock you haven't got.
Linking a batch to menu items
Under Linked Menu Items, connect a batch to the dishes served from it, and set a Serving Size — how much of the batch one serving consumes, in the batch's own unit.
For chai held in litres, a serving size of 0.15 means 150 ml per cup. Sell a cup, and 150 ml comes
off the batch.
Batch stock
Batch Inventory shows what you're holding: batch name, Quantity Available, Created On, Expiry, Cost Per Unit and status — Active, Expired or Finished.
Watch the expiry column. A batch that expires is waste, and it's waste you could have seen coming.
A batch recipe with active stock can't be deleted.
Recipes or batch recipes?
| Use a recipe when | Use a batch recipe when |
|---|---|
| The dish is made to order | It's made in advance, in quantity |
| Ingredients go straight onto the plate | It becomes an intermediate you serve from |
| One sale, one set of ingredients | One production run, many sales |
Plenty of dishes use both: a curry whose recipe includes 200 ml of a batch-made sauce plus made-to-order protein and garnish.
Keeping them honest
Recipes rot. Suppliers change, portions drift, someone tweaks the dish.
- Review after any menu change. A changed dish is a changed recipe.
- Review after a supplier change. Different pack, different yield.
- Check against reality every few months. Weigh a portion and compare.
- Use the usage report. Actual usage against expected usage is exactly the signal that a recipe has stopped matching the kitchen — see Inventory reports.
Good to know
- Each variation needs its own recipe. Restodesk tells you when all variations of an item are covered.
- Recipes can carry a preparation time, which feeds the average prep time statistic.
- Recipes are searchable by menu item or by ingredient — so "what uses double cream?" is one search, which is how you handle a supply problem.
- Without a recipe, selling a dish takes nothing out of stock. Silently. That's the trap in partial coverage.