How to Create Ingredients
Summary: The main building blocks of recipe costing are your ingredients. Tied to an ingredient are the purchase cost, yield percentage and measurement converters. These all influence the calculation of the cost of an individual ingredient on a recipe. Once these have been set properly, ingredient costs can then be calculated on recipes.
How to create: To create ingredients, simply click the Ingredients link on the navigation panel. Then open the "New Ingredient" section by clicking on the header.
New Ingredient
Name: The name of the ingredient should be descriptive. Simply putting in 'Flour' may not be enough. You may have to add details ('All Purpose Flour') and possibly even the manufacturer ('All Purpose Flour - Red Robin').
You can add multiple ingredients at once. Separate the ingredients into new lines in the name field by pressing the return (enter) key, and they will all be created as separate ingredients. Please note that they will all share the set category, but this can be changed later.
Category: Setting the category of the ingredient will help you to keep your ingredients organized. The category can be used as a search term in the ingredients list.
Create (and Edit):
Pressing the Create button will create the ingredient entry and return to this screen. This will speed up the entry of multiple ingredients before adding additional details.
Pressing the Create & Edit button will create the ingredient and move you into the ingredient information page so that you can add more details to the ingredient, such as the purchase price, yield percentage or measurement converter. This is a methodical way to enter your ingredients when you already have all the data you need and don't want to miss entering any of the ingredient data.
Edit the Ingredient:
To edit an ingredient you can either click on 'Create & Edit' when you create the ingredient or click on the ingredient in the listing of ingredients. The ingredient will open with the follow sections available:
Details
The Details section in an ingredient will have the ingredient name and category and these can be edited here if required. The yield percentage can be adjusted as well.
Add Purchase (Needed for Recipe Cost Calculation)
Purchase History: (showing last 5)
Cost History Chart:
Purchase Cost: Adding the purchase cost will enable the system to calculate the cost of the ingredient if used with the same measurement type on the recipe (i.e. if purchased in pounds, you would need to use weight measurements).
To overcome this limitation, you can add a measurement converter to the ingredient to be able to use another type of measurements.
Adding a new purchase cost will not remove the cost of old purchases, but rather it will add a new purchase record. The system will use the latest purchase cost for all calculations, but will show the previous purchases as reference.
This section also contains the cost of the last 5 purchases, and the PLUS account will show a cost history chart. The chart will visually present the change in the cost of an ingredient.
Measurement Converters allow you to use a different measurement type (i.e. volume, weight, count or distance) on a recipe than what was used for the purchase. A good example is 'Flour', since it's often purchased in a WEIGHT measurement (for example, in pounds). But recipes often ask for it in cups or tablespoons, which are VOLUME measurements. Since no two ingredients have the exact same density, a measurement converter needs to be assigned to each ingredient.
The PLUS account provides measurement converters for many ingredients that have a nutrition link, which makes it much easier to add measurement converters.
Check out the measurement converters help page for more details.
Used on these recipes:
Used on these recipes: This is a list of recipes that show where an ingredient has been used. Clicking on any of the recipes in this list will open a new tab and show that recipe.
PLUS Account Features:
Allergens
Allergen Tagging: You can also tag allergens to your ingredients. The recipes will show the allergens of added ingredients once these have been tagged.
Nutrition Database
Nutrition Information:
Adding nutrition information to ingredients will enable the calculation of the Nutrition Summary on a recipe. These summaries will give basic nutritional information, including the calorie count.
In addition to nutrition information, it may also make measurement converters available to be selected on an ingredient.