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There are three reasons for recipes, which is often 2 more than many chefs appreciate. First you need to know how to cook the dish, then you need to build your costs and finally, you may get to publish that cookbook one day.

With building any recipe there is one thing I can not emphasize more, cost everything in there. What do you need to cost for a pan fried rib eye steak? Some would say a steak. That’s a fair start to the exercise, but if you are cooking something from a recipe you need all the ingredients listed.

Even if the ingredients are at such a small level that you feel they would not be material to your costing, still measure them and record your findings. At some point you may substitute or upgrade ingredients and you may see a shift in the costs. Nothing is too small to capture the first time out.

Ingredients for a steak recipe:

10oz ribeye steak

½ oz butter

½ oz oil

1tsp chopped parsley

1 sprig of rosemary

2 cloves of garlic

Pinch of salt

Grind of black pepper

If you went through that list and put a cost against each item you may see more than 10% of the whole recipe in the ingredients below the steak. So potentially at this point you could have lost an invisible slice of your margin without knowing it. However, it goes deeper than that. If you don’t cost an ingredient then you tend not to hold it as important. Something like that sprig of rosemary could be bought in small plastic packs which cost a fortune when compared with a fresh plant on the windowsill. It may only take an un-costed splash of brandy and some wild mushrooms to ensure you have a loss leader going out of the kitchen door.

Some of this may seem penny pinching and even a little too complicated. Give yourself some time to work through these pages, build some models and get familiar with the process. You will find that this turns into a simple routine with lots of advantages.

A quick example of this is if you didn’t get a basic cost for your salt and one day you start to brine, cure or salt crust dishes. If you ignored how you purchase your salt, you could get a shock if you have never kept an eye on the price, which brings us around too …