Resources

What Is the Ingredient Library?

An ingredient is anything you buy to cook with — double cream, 00 flour, free-range eggs, Maldon salt. The library is your master list of these, each with a cost per unit and the unit it's measured in (per kg, per litre, per each). Once an ingredient is costed, any recipe that uses it knows exactly what that quantity costs.

Adding Ingredients

Go to Logistics → Ingredients and click New Ingredient (or add rows inline). For each one, set:

• A name — what you call the ingredient in the kitchen.
• A cost per unit and the unit it's measured in (kg, g, litre, ml, each).
• An optional category (dairy, dry goods, produce, meat & fish…) to keep a long pantry navigable.
• Optional supplier and brand so you remember where you usually buy it.

Estimated Costs

Don't want to cost every line by hand to get started? Puree can estimate a cost for an ingredient and flag how confident it is in that figure. It's a sensible starting number you can refine later, rather than a blank field that stalls your whole library. Costs you enter yourself always take priority.

Finding and Merging Duplicates

Real pantries accumulate duplicates — "cream", "Cream", "double cream". The duplicates tool spots likely matches and lets you merge them into a single ingredient, so costs stay consistent everywhere they're referenced. If a suggested pair isn't actually a duplicate, you can dismiss it and Puree won't raise it again.

Keeping Costs Current

Ingredient prices never sit still. Rather than re-typing them, you can upload a supplier's price list and let Puree update the costs for you — see Supplier Price Lists in this section. When an ingredient's cost changes, every recipe and dish that uses it re-costs automatically.

For the bigger picture of how ingredients, recipes and food cost fit together, see .