Structured recipes vs freeform notes

Two things in the system look like recipes. Both have a name. Both might describe how the kitchen makes something. Both can sit on the daily prep board as a task the morning crew works through. But only one of them carries cost — and the difference matters every single time the food-cost number on the dashboard surprises someone.

This page is for two readers. If you’re the owner, “Why this page exists” is for you — start there. If you’re the head chef, jump to “How to tell them apart” and skim down to the worked example.

Why this page exists

A kitchen with a hundred preps doesn’t write a hundred structured recipes on day one. It writes the ten or fifteen that drive most of the volume — the ragù, the dough, the stock, the pomodoro — and leaves everything else as a scribbled note: “simmer the bones with mirepoix for eight hours”, “toast the breadcrumbs in olive oil and rosemary”. The notes work as kitchen documentation. They do not work as cost data.

Without realising it, the kitchen ends up running two parallel ledgers. The big preps have a real cost that the till deducts from when a dish sells. The freeform preps have a zero cost — because the system has no ingredient list to total up — and every dish that uses one of them is undercosted by exactly the amount that prep is worth. At the end of the month the food-cost dashboard reads 26% and the bank account reads 32%, and nobody can explain where the gap went.

The fix isn’t to ban freeform notes. They’re useful — for one-off preps, for things the chef hasn’t decided to commit to yet, for procedure reminders that aren’t really productions at all. The fix is to know the difference, and to upgrade a freeform note into a structured recipe the moment the prep starts moving real volume.

The rule

A structured recipe carries cost. A freeform note doesn’t. Anything the kitchen makes in volume — and any prep whose ingredients you want to see on the dashboard — has to be a structured recipe. Everything else can stay as a note, as long as you accept that the dishes consuming it will read as cheaper than they really are.

How to tell them apart

The two kinds of thing share the same name on the prep board — recipe — but the form behind each is shaped completely differently.

A structured recipe is the editor you reach from Recipes → + New recipe. It has all the fields the kitchen needs the system to know about: an ingredient list where each row is a pantry item plus a quantity, a yield quantity and a unit, a producing-batch toggle, optional shelf life, optional cook time, optional photos. The cost panel on the right side ticks live as you type — €0.50 for the pasta, €0.80 for the pecorino, €0.03 for the pepper, total €1.33 per portion — because the system is multiplying every ingredient’s current price by its quantity and totalling them up. Save the recipe and the same total appears on the dish that consumes it, on the prep item the recipe produces, on the dashboard, and on every report that touches food cost.

A freeform note is what the head chef writes on the prep board for a one-line task that doesn’t have a producing recipe: “Defrost two kilos of guanciale at 5 AM”, “Toast 500 g of breadcrumbs in olive oil and rosemary”, “Check walk-in temperatures and write them on the safety board”. The form is a title and a notes field. No ingredients. No yield. No cost. The morning crew sees the task on the checklist, does the thing, ticks the box, and the system records that it happened — that’s the whole loop.

Both can appear on the same daily prep board. A structured recipe shows as a row with a quantity (“5 kg Pizza Dough”) and a ▶ Start button that opens a live batch card on the work-in-progress board; tapping Log to stock at the end of the card deducts every ingredient from inventory and freezes the cost of the batch into the production ledger. A freeform note shows as a row with just a title and a checkbox; ticking it marks it done and nothing moves in the pantry.

When each one is right

Use a structured recipe when the kitchen is making something the system needs to know the cost of. That includes anything sold as a dish, anything used as an ingredient in another dish, and anything produced in enough volume that pretending it’s free will distort the dashboard. Sauces, doughs, stocks, marinades, soup bases, mixes — almost every regular prep falls here. Write the recipe once, save, and the cost tracking is permanent.

Use a freeform note when the task isn’t really a production — it’s a reminder, a checkbox, a safety check, a station-prep step. “Rinse the mussels”, “Polish the silverware”, “Defrost two kilos of guanciale”, “Order chicken from the butcher”. Nothing about these would benefit from an ingredient list. They’re items on a to-do list that happen to live next to the structured recipes because the kitchen works through one daily list, not two.

The grey zone is the prep the chef hasn’t decided to commit to yet. “Toast 500 g of breadcrumbs” sounds like a freeform note, but if the breadcrumbs end up on top of three dishes every night for the rest of the month, that’s a structured recipe waiting to be written — bread (or stale focaccia), oil, herbs, salt, yield in grams, cost rolled up. The signal that it’s time to upgrade is usually the food-cost dashboard: the dish using the breadcrumbs reads as suspiciously cheap, and the suspicion is exactly what a structured recipe would resolve.

What you lose if you keep a high-volume prep as freeform

Four things, each visible somewhere on the dashboard.

Cost. The note has no ingredient list, so the prep itself costs €0 on every dish that consumes it. The dish that should cost €4.10 in ingredients reads as €3.40 — the difference is invisible.

Cascade. When the price of an ingredient inside the prep moves — beef bones up 12%, breadcrumbs up because olive oil moved — the dishes downstream don’t reconcile. The recipe target on the dashboard stays where it was; the bank account quietly drifts.

Inventory deduction. A structured recipe, when its batch is logged to stock, deducts every ingredient from its pantry row. A freeform note doesn’t — the kitchen makes the breadcrumbs from a kilo of stale focaccia, and the focaccia row stays at the number it was before. Across a month, the gap between the system’s stock figure and the walk-in’s actual stock figure widens by exactly the amount the freeform notes consumed.

Production history. Every batch a structured recipe produces writes one line to the production ledger — date, yield, frozen cost, cook. A freeform note writes a checkbox. When the food-cost report at the end of the month surprises you and you want to trace which batch put which number where, the freeform notes are blanks.

Converting a freeform note into a structured recipe

When you decide a freeform note has earned a recipe of its own, the path is to write it from scratch in Recipes → + New recipe, name it the same as the note, fill in the ingredient list, yield, and unit, save, then delete the old freeform note. The kitchen sees the same name on tomorrow’s prep board, but now tapping ▶ Start spawns a live batch card and Log to stock runs the full deduction-and-cost loop.

For preps that produce something other recipes already consume under a different name — a stock the bolognese refers to, a base sauce the pizza recipe pulls from — write the structured recipe first, save it (the system creates the producing prep item for you), then open each downstream recipe and re-point the ingredient at the new prep item. That swap moves the cost out of “blank” and into “tracked”, and every dish further down the chain reconciles within the same minute.

What happens behind the scenes

A structured recipe is a row in the recipes catalogue with an ingredient list, a yield, and a producing prep item the system creates on first save. Every save recomputes the cost-per-unit on both sides — recipe and prep item — and a cost-cascade walks every recipe and dish downstream that references the prep, refreshing each one’s totals in the same transaction. A logged batch writes a production batch ledger row that captures the actual ingredients consumed, their prices on the day, and the actual yield the cook entered.

A freeform note is a row in the prep-tasks list for a date, with a title, optional notes, an optional assignee, and a status flag. There’s no ingredient list, no producing recipe, no prep item. Ticking it writes a timestamp and a “done” flag and that’s the entire effect on the system.

The two kinds share one screen — the daily prep board — and one filter (the prep-kitchen tabs at the top), but they live in different tables underneath, and only one of them touches inventory. That separation is on purpose: it lets the kitchen mix high-discipline cost tracking with low-friction reminders on the same checklist, without forcing either to compromise.

Worked example

Marco’s been running your venue for nine months. Service is stable, the menu has settled. He opens the food-cost dashboard on Sunday evening and the number reads 24.8%, which is what it’s read since the start. The bank account, when his accountant emails on Monday morning, says food cost was actually 31.2% last month. The gap is over six points — on €40,000 of food sales, about €2,560 of margin he can’t see.

Marco starts at the top of the dish list, sorted by volume. The fourth dish down is a soup-of-the-day that uses what the kitchen calls House stock — a freeform note on the morning prep checklist that reads “simmer 3 kg beef bones, 500 g mirepoix, salt, 8h”. Every soup, every risotto, every braise on the menu uses house stock, between 100 ml and 300 ml per portion. He opens one of the soup recipes on the Recipes page. The ingredient line for house stock reads quantity 200 ml, cost €0.00 — because house stock isn’t a structured recipe, it doesn’t produce a prep item, and the system has nothing to multiply 200 ml against.

He goes to Recipes → + New recipe and writes the structured version. Name: House stock. Ingredients: 3 kg beef bones at €2.20/kg = €6.60; 300 g onion + 100 g celery + 100 g carrot (mirepoix) ≈ €0.85; 30 g salt, negligible; 12 L water, free. Total: €7.45. Yield: 8 L (long simmer reduces 12 L down to 8). Unit: L. Batched: on. Shelf life: 96 hours. He saves.

Two things happen at once. The pantry gets a new row: House stock, L2, Kitchen production category, 0 L in stock, cost €0.93/L. And every existing soup, risotto and braise on the menu — fifteen dishes in all — picks the new prep up automatically as soon as Marco swaps the ingredient. He opens the first soup recipe, deletes the freeform “house stock” line, adds House stock (the prep item) at 200 ml. The cost panel on the right ticks up from €1.85 to €2.04 per portion. Food-cost percentage on the dish moves from 18% to 19.8%. Small per plate; meaningful across the menu.

By the end of the afternoon Marco has re-pointed all fifteen dishes. The dashboard’s food-cost percentage settles to 30.6% — within half a point of the bank-account number, the closest the two have ever read each other. The freeform note disappears from the prep board (deleted); the structured House stock recipe replaces it, with a ▶ Start button the morning crew uses to actually run the prep, and a Log to stock action at the end that deducts the bones and mirepoix from the pantry the way every other batched prep does. One conversion, six points of food cost found.

Prep — overview — the back-of-house workflow where both structured recipes and freeform notes appear on the same daily checklist
Work in progress board — the live queue where structured-recipe batches move through In progress → Resting → Ready; freeform notes don’t appear here
Prep items — every structured batched recipe produces a prep item; freeform notes don’t
Recipes — how the kitchen turns ingredients into a costed output — the structured-recipe editor that’s the canonical place to write or upgrade a recipe
Recipe yield unit — the two fields on a structured recipe that drive how downstream dishes cost against it
Log to stock — the action a structured-recipe batch ends in; freeform notes end in a checkbox tick
Daily tasks — the planning surface above the live batches; the place a freeform note lives most comfortably
Inventory — overview — the pantry where the cost cascade lands
Where your information lives — the five rooms of the system; this distinction is the difference between two rooms touching and one room sitting alone
Prices, costs, and margins — the broader rule about why every untracked cost shows up as a missing margin somewhere