The chef's guide to recipe costing (without the spreadsheet pain)

Recipe costing sounds simple: add up what goes on the plate. In practice, three things trip up almost everyone: yields, unit conversions, and sub-recipes. Get those right and your plate costs become something you can actually price against.

Cost the usable yield, not the purchase weight

You buy a whole product, but you serve the trimmed, peeled, cooked portion. A case of carrots that yields 80% usable means the carrots on the plate cost 25% more than the case price implies. Costing the purchase weight instead of the yield is the most common reason a "30% food cost" is really 34%.

Respect the units

Ingredients are bought in cases, priced per pound, and used in grams or each. Every conversion is a chance to be off by an order of magnitude. Doing this by hand in a spreadsheet works until someone fat-fingers a cell, and then every dish using that ingredient is wrong, silently.

Build with sub-recipes

Your demi-glace, your house pickle, your spice blend: these are recipes that feed other recipes. Costing them once and nesting them keeps everything consistent: improve the demi-glace recipe and every dish that uses it re-costs automatically. Flattening everything into one giant ingredient list is how costs drift apart over time.

Then connect cost to price

A plate cost on its own is just trivia. The point is the relationship between cost and menu price: your margin. Once every dish carries a live margin, pricing decisions stop being guesses and menu engineering becomes possible.

• Enter ingredient prices the way you buy (per case, per pound, per each).
• Set yields so the plate reflects usable product.
• Build sub-recipes once and nest them everywhere.
• Read margin alongside cost so pricing has a basis.

This is the core of what Curry does. You enter the prices and yields once; it handles the conversions, the roll-ups, and the re-costing every time something changes.