Adding a Recipe

Add a recipe to a menu item and Puree works out what the dish costs you to make. Write it once, with the ingredients and quantities you actually use, and the food cost, cost per portion and margin stay up to date as your ingredient prices change.

Two Ways to Start

From the menu item. Open the item’s edit page and find the Recipe panel. Click Link a recipe and the recipe editor opens with that item already attached. The panel only appears on items in a menu category, once the item has been saved.

From the Recipes page. Go to Logistics → Recipes and click New recipe. At the top of the editor, choose Attach to an existing menu item and pick any menu item that has no recipe yet, or leave it on Create a new menu item and give the new dish a name, category and selling price right there. Saving the recipe creates the menu item too.

Each menu item holds one recipe, and a recipe belongs to one item. Bundles (a platter or lunch box made of other catalogue items) do not take a recipe: cost their contents instead. See Recipes & Food Cost.

Yield and Times

Set Makes: the quantity the recipe produces as written, with its Unit. Portions, servings, batches or pieces are the usual choices, but any weight or volume unit works too, so “makes 2 kg” is fine for a sauce. Cost per portion is worked out from this figure, so make it honest. Add prep and cook times in minutes if you want them on the recipe card.

Adding Ingredients

Type in the Search and add ingredients box, or click Add ingredient for a blank line. Matches from your Ingredients Library appear as you type; pick one and the cursor jumps to the quantity so you can keep moving. If the ingredient is not in your library yet, choose Create from the same list and it is added with the name you typed. Give it a cost later from the Ingredients page, or let Puree estimate one (see Using AI to Help).

You can build a whole recipe by hand this way. If you are happy to spend AI credits, importing or drafting it (see Importing Your Recipes) is a lot quicker: every ingredient and quantity lands at once, and a run costs one credit, about 50 NZ cents.

For each line you set:

• Quantity and unit. The unit can differ from how the ingredient is priced: a flour costed per kg can be measured in grams or cups, and Puree converts between weight and volume when it knows how. If it cannot, the line shows an amber note and offers to estimate the missing conversion.
• Waste %, behind the cog at the end of the line. It is an allowance for trim and peel loss, not leftovers: 200 g usable at 20% waste puts 250 g on the shopping list, and the line cost matches.
• Notes, also behind the cog, for preparation detail such as “finely diced” or “room temperature”.

The food cost at the top of the editor updates as you add lines, so you can see the effect of each ingredient straight away.

Lines marked ≈ AI est. cost are using an estimated ingredient price. Click the pencil beside the mark to set the real cost, or see Using AI to Help for how estimates work.

Scaling a Batch

Under Making, enter how many you are actually producing for an event. Every quantity and the total cost scale live, and a badge shows the factor (×2.50, for example). Reset to base yield returns to the recipe as written. Nothing about the saved recipe changes: scaling is a working view for the kitchen.

Modifiers, Method and Photo

Modifiers are optional extras or variations on the dish, such as “Add bacon (+$1)” or “Make it a combo”, each with its own price.

The Method is a rich-text field for the steps themselves. Fill it in and the recipe becomes a proper kitchen card rather than just a costing sheet. It also feeds the AI photo prompt and the dietary detection described in Using AI to Help.

Upload a photo of the finished dish if you have one. It is the menu item’s photo, so it appears wherever that item is shown.

Components: Recipes Inside Recipes

A dressing, a stock, a pastry or a filling is usually made once and used in several dishes. Write it as a component and every recipe that uses it shares the cost.

On the Recipes page, open the Components filter and click New component. The editor is the same one you use for a dish, minus the menu item: give the component a name, say what a batch makes (1 litre of dressing, 4 litres of stock, 12 portions of pie filling), and add its ingredients and method as usual.

To use it, add a line to any recipe and type the component’s name into the ingredient search. Components appear alongside ingredients with a Component tag. Pick one and enter how much the recipe uses, in the component’s own yield unit or a related one: 60 ml of a dressing that makes a litre, or 2 portions of a filling that makes 12. The line is costed as that share of the component’s batch.

Costs flow through. Change the price of the oil in the dressing, or make the dressing recipe yield more, and every dish using it recosts on its own. A dish stays marked Partial cost while one of its components is not fully costed, and the badge tells you which. Shopping lists buy the component’s ingredients scaled to the orders, and a dish’s allergens and dietary checks look inside its components too.

Components can use other components, so a pie filling can use a stock. A recipe can never contain itself, and a component that is still used somewhere cannot be deleted.

After You Save

Puree totals the ingredient costs and stores the recipe’s food cost. On the menu item you will see cost per portion and margin, colour-coded green, amber or red. The Recipes page lists every menu item with its recipe, margin and how many portions are on upcoming orders (today, tomorrow, the next 7, 14 and 30 days), so you can see which dishes matter most. From there you can Download PDF for a printable recipe card, and View Food Cost Table for the line-by-line breakdown.

The recipe’s name follows the menu item’s name, so renaming the item renames the recipe.

Already have recipes written down somewhere else? See Importing Your Recipes rather than typing them in.