Kitchen Recipe Library

The recipe library is where your dishes live. It is a small record on purpose — ingredients, times, yield, a station and a method — but almost everything else in KitchenSync reads from it. Prep lists are generated from recipes, prep quantities are scaled from their yields, and food cost comes from their ingredient costs.

The library

KitchenSync → Recipes shows every recipe as a card. Each card carries the photo, the name, and three figures: Yield in servings, Time, and Cost/srv. Underneath is the ingredient count.

Time is prep and cook added together for display only; the two are stored separately and the recipe never shows a single "total time" field you can edit.

There is no search box, no filter and no sort on this page. The grid is the whole interface. That is fine at forty recipes and awkward at four hundred, so name dishes so they read well in a grid — "Chicken, herb-roasted" sorts and scans better than "Herb-Roasted Chicken Breast with Pan Jus".

Creating one

New Recipe opens a sheet.

Field	Notes
Name	"e.g. Herb-Roasted Chicken"
Description	Short, for context
Yield servings	Defaults to 1. Everything downstream divides by it
Prep (min) and Cook (min)	Stored separately, never summed for you
Station	Grill, Hot Line, Cold Line, Prep, Pastry, Bar or General
Photo	Uploaded, or left empty
Instructions	One text field, written as steps

There is no category and no cuisine field. If you have read otherwise, that description was of a product that was never built — and there is nothing to filter on even if you put a category in the name.

Ingredients

Each ingredient row is four things: name, quantity, unit, and cost per unit. Nothing else — no preparation note, no "finely chopped" column. If that matters, it belongs in the ingredient name or the instructions.

Rows keep the order you add them in.

Cost per serving is calculated for you

Save the recipe and KitchenSync sums quantity × cost per unit across the ingredients and divides by the yield. That figure is stored on the recipe and shown on its card.

One blank cost per unit drags the whole number down without warning, which makes the dish look cheaper than it is. Recipe costing goes through what it takes to make the figure trustworthy.

Scaling

Open a recipe and set the servings you need. Ingredient quantities recalculate, the header shows the scale factor, and Print produces a kitchen card at the scaled quantities.

You rarely need to do this by hand — generating a prep plan on a catering order scales every recipe on the menu at once. Recipe scaling and yield covers where the arithmetic stops helping.

What recipes feed

Prep plans. Generating a prep list on a catering order reads the menu's selections, works out servings needed per recipe, and creates one task per recipe, scaled, on that recipe's station.
Inventory. Finalizing a prep plan deducts the scaled ingredients from stock, matching each to an inventory item by name and unit. Names that do not match are reported, not silently skipped — which is why ingredient names are worth keeping identical to your inventory names.
Reports. Cost per serving drives the Recipes tab and the food-cost figures.

What is not here

No versioning or change history, no allergen tagging on the recipe itself (allergens live on the menu item), no yield-unit other than servings, no sub-recipes, and no import. Recipes are typed in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I organize recipes into categories? No. There is no category, cuisine or tag field, and no filtering.

Does changing an ingredient cost update the recipe? When you save the recipe, yes. It is not recalculated behind your back, so a recipe you have not opened in six months is carrying the cost it had then.

Can I import my recipes? No. They are entered by hand.

Does scaling change the stored recipe? No. Scaling is a view for printing and reading; the recipe keeps its own yield.