How to make a recipe costing step by step (with a burger example)

And when I say every, I mean every. Not only the meat, fish or main ingredient. You should also include:

• Oil, salt and spices.
• Sauces, bread and garnishes.
• Decorations and consumables directly tied to the dish.
• Packaging and bags for delivery or takeaway orders.

One of the most common mistakes is ignoring the small ingredients because «that costs next to nothing». And it's true. Two grams of salt cost very little. The problem is that salt is rarely the only thing forgotten. Part of the oil gets forgotten too. The sauce. The bun. The garnish. The small container. The ketchup sachet. The special napkin. The garnish.

And when you add up all those small costs and multiply them by thousands of covers, they stop being so small. You don't need to obsess over counting every peppercorn. But you do need a reasonable estimate of every consumption that goes into the dish. Because what you leave out of the recipe costing doesn't disappear. You still pay for it. You simply don't know you're paying for it.

This is where «a bit», «a handful», «more or less», «whatever it takes», «until it looks enough» ends. You need concrete quantities: 180 grams of meat, 250 grams of potato, 30 grams of sauce, 10 millilitres of oil, two 20-gram cheese slices, one bun.

When each cook uses a different amount, it isn't only the presentation that changes. The cost changes too. Suppose the recipe card says a burger should carry 150 grams of meat, but the kitchen is using 180 grams. You're serving 30 extra grams on every plate.

And we're talking about a single ingredient. A recipe card isn't there to decorate a folder. It's there so the dish carries the same amount when you cook, when your head chef cooks, and when someone new joins the team. That protects cost. But it also protects the guest experience. Because nobody wants a spectacular burger on Saturday and a skinny version on Tuesday.

To work out how much the quantity used in a recipe costs, you first need the ingredient price in a usable unit: euros per kilogram, euros per litre, euros per unit.

You buy a box of 24 eggs for €5.28:

You buy a five-litre jerry can of oil for €27.50:

And here's a fundamental detail: always use up-to-date purchase prices. A recipe costing based on last year's prices can give you a completely false sense of profitability. The dish doesn't know you haven't updated the spreadsheet. Neither does your supplier.

When you analyse sales, costs and margins you should use amounts excluding VAT. Why? Because the VAT you charge the guest is not real restaurant revenue. You collect it to settle it later with the tax authorities.

Even though the guest paid €14.50, to calculate food cost and margin you must use the €13.18 net. This mistake is very common. And it can make you think a dish leaves more money than it really does. You'll see the full calculation in food cost and gross margin.

This is one of the places where the most money can hide. Not everything you buy ends up on the plate. Fish has head, bones and guts. Meat can lose fat, bone or water. Vegetables get peeled. Some foods lose weight during cooking.

Suppose you buy fish at €12/kg. After cleaning it, you only use 80%:

The supplier hasn't cheated you. Neither has the waste. The problem is that you were calculating as if you could serve the bones, the skin and the head.

Once you know the cost of each ingredient, you only need to add them up. Let's look at Carlos's burger:

The general formula is:

This matters especially for large batches such as sauces, stews, cakes, croquettes, stocks, desserts and prep work. For example: total cost of a croquette recipe: €24. Actual yield: 80 croquettes.

And here's another important rule: don't divide by the portions you think should come out. Divide by the ones that actually come out. Because on paper you always get more croquettes. Then someone hits the kitchen, makes them a bit bigger, and ten units go missing.

With cost per portion in hand, the next step is to know how much you really earn on the dish. And if you want to check that the paper holds up in the kitchen, read theoretical vs actual cost.