What is a recipe costing (and why yours is probably out of date)

First day for a new cook. They see the word in the pass notebook and ask.

The answer you hear in almost every kitchen sounds like this: “Add up what goes in the dish. You do it when you build the menu and you’re done.”

It is not a bad answer. It is the one almost all of us were given.

But it has two holes, and margin leaks through both.

A recipe costing is the calculation of the real cost of one portion of a dish, ingredient by ingredient.

It tells you how much each dish leaves when it leaves the pass. With that number you decide its price, its gram weight, or whether it stays on the menu.

A complete recipe costing captures, at minimum, this:

The true part of “add up what goes in the dish”: the base of any recipe costing is a sum. You do not need more maths than multiply and add.

The part that fails is the yield-loss row, the price row, and the words “you’re done”.

Three things people confuse with a recipe costing — and that are not one.

• The technical sheet. It covers how a dish is cooked and plated, and often its allergens. It can include the costing, but a technical sheet without prices tells you nothing about margin.
• Food cost. It is a percentage: portion cost divided by selling price excluding VAT. It comes from the costing; it does not replace it.

Theoretical menu cost. It is what you should spend if everyone cooked exactly as your costings say. What you really spend is another figure, and we cover that gap in why a perfect recipe costing can still lose money.

Almost every guide says a recipe costing was an instrument for measuring sea depth. That is only half true.

According to the Diccionario de la lengua española of the RAE, the word comes from Occitan escandall, sounding lead. The escandallo was the part of the lead with a cavity filled with tallow, used to “recognise the quality of the seabed” by what stuck to it.

It did not only measure how deep the water was. It took a sample to know what the bottom was like.

That is also the dictionary’s second sense: taking a few units from a set as representative of the quality of the whole. The sense of calculating cost or selling price arrives in the fourth sense, marked as a commerce term, and the Student’s Dictionary illustrates it with the price of a medicine — not a dish.

Translated to the kitchen: you do not need to cost the whole menu to know how it is doing. Ten well-chosen dishes — the ones you sell most — tell you what the bottom looks like.

No. The first hole is yield loss.

Galician-style octopus. PVP €16 including VAT, which is €14.55 excluding VAT. A 200 g portion of already-cooked octopus.

Prices and cooking loss are our reference for this example, not market prices: every supplier, every octopus and every cook gives a different figure.

But octopus loses weight when you cook it. With 45% loss, to serve 200 g cooked you must buy 364 g raw.

The gap is €2.46 per portion. At 300 portions a month, that is €738 of margin you thought you had and did not. In a year, €8,856.

With a single dish.

The second hole is “you’re done”.

A recipe costing is only as good as the price it was built with. When an ingredient that weighs in the dish goes up, that costing is expired.

Same octopus. The supplier raises it from €15 to €17 per kilo.

Portion cost moves from €5.78 to €6.51. Food cost, from 39.7% to 44.7%.

Against the add-it-up costing you had pinned in the kitchen, it is no longer €2.46 per portion. It is €3.19, about €957 a month at 300 portions.

Nobody changed the recipe. Nobody over-portioned. A delivery note arrived.

To build one from scratch, scale in hand, see how to cost a burger from start to finish.

Pick your ten dishes. The ten you sell most, not the ten you like most. They are your sample of the bottom.

Weigh the usable yield, not the gross. For each ingredient with yield loss, weigh what goes in and what is left. Once per ingredient is enough to start.

Check the date on every price. If a costing’s price is older than the latest delivery note for that ingredient, that dish is uncosted even if it has a sheet.

And if a dish comes out above what its price can carry, that is not a costing failure. That is exactly what it is for.

There is no single definition.

Some industry guides call a recipe costing the document — the sheet with ingredients, grams and prices. Others call it the calculation. The RAE defines it as determining the cost or selling price of a good from what goes into it: the act, not the paper.

We use it as a calculation, because that is what expires. The sheet can stay on the wall with last year’s prices.

There is also no agreement on what goes in. Some kitchens put fryer oil and bread into every costing; others treat them separately. As long as you do it the same way every time, both approaches work.

And the 45% octopus loss is our reference for the example. Yours depends on the product and cook time, and you only know it by weighing.

If you want to start today with your ten dishes, open our recipe-costing Excel and ask us for the editable copy — it is free; if you prefer every delivery note to update cost without touching a cell, tell us and we will look at it in Tipi.

Sailors did not cast the lead once when leaving harbour. They cast it whenever the bottom changed.