Restaurant recipe card template: a recipe costing card, with a qutab example

The morning cook folds qutab one way, the evening cook another. One is generous with the filling, the other with the butter. Guests taste the difference, and you see it in the report at the end of the month. The document that puts a stop to this is the tech card, also called a recipe costing card.

What a recipe card is and who needs it

A tech card, or recipe costing card, is a dish's passport: which ingredients go in and in what weight, how it is cooked and how it is plated.

It works in three places at once:

• in the kitchen it keeps the taste and the portion the same every time;
• on the owner's and manager's desk it shows portion cost and margin in numbers;
• in the stockroom it tells you how much of each ingredient every portion sold uses.

A kitchen without recipe cards runs on the cook's memory. When the cook leaves, the recipes leave too.

What a restaurant recipe card template must contain

A good card is short but complete. At a minimum:

1. Name and version. The menu name, the date of the last change and who signed it off.
2. Yield. The weight or count of the finished portion: "3 pieces, about 270 g".
3. Ingredients: gross, loss %, net. Gross is what you take from the stockroom. Net is what is left after cleaning. The link is simple: net = gross × (1 − loss).
4. Price and cost. The unit price of each ingredient and the cost of each line. Portion cost is the sum of these lines.
5. Method. Step by step, with temperatures and times.
6. Plating. Which plate, how it is arranged, what goes alongside.
7. Allergens. Gluten, milk, eggs, nuts and so on. When a guest asks, the waiter has to give an exact answer.
8. Photo. A picture of the finished dish. One photo replaces three paragraphs of description.

Example: a recipe costing card for qutab with greens

Qutab are thin half-moon flatbreads filled with greens and cooked on a dry saj. The prices below are hypothetical, so plug in your own suppliers' figures.

• Dish: qutab with greens
• Yield: 1 portion = 3 pieces, about 270 g
• Version: No. 3, with the date of the last change and the head chef's signature
• Menu price: 5.00 ₼

Portion cost is 1.46 ₼. At 5.00 ₼ on the menu, food cost is 29.2% and the margin is 3.54 ₼ a portion. Salt is weighed too (3 g), but it costs less than one qəpik, so it is left out of the table.

Method:

1. Divide the dough into 50 g balls and roll each into a circle about 2 mm thick and 20 cm across.
2. Wash, dry and finely chop the greens. Add the salt (3 g) just before filling, or the greens will release their juice.
3. Spread the filling over half the circle, fold into a half-moon and press the edges shut.
4. Cook on a hot dry saj or pan, 1–1.5 minutes per side, no oil.
5. Brush with butter and serve straight away.

Plating: 3 qutab fanned out on a flat plate, sumac on the side in a small bowl. Qatıq is offered as a modifier at its own price.

Allergens: gluten (wheat flour), milk (butter; qatıq if chosen).

Photo: the plate shot from above, with the fold and the colour clearly visible.

Prep items: their own cards for dough and sauce

On the qutab card, dough is a single line: "0.150 kg". But what does the dough itself cost? For that it needs a card of its own:

The raw ingredients weigh 1.01 kg and 10 g stays on the board and in the bowl. The yield is 1.00 kg, so a kilogram of dough costs 0.80 ₼. That is the price on the qutab card.

A separate card for a semi-finished product pays off three ways:

• One place to change. When flour goes up, you update only the dough card, and qutab and every other dish made from that dough get the new number.
• Made in batches. The cook mixes 5 kg of dough in the morning and portions it through the day. The prep card is written per batch, the dish card per portion.
• Its own losses. Sauce that reduces, broth that is strained and flour left on the board are all accounted for once, on the prep card.

Sauces follow the same logic. Take a tomato sauce for lülə kabab: 1.5 kg of tomatoes cook down to 1 kg of sauce, a 33% loss. That loss is written once on the sauce card, and on the kabab card the sauce is just one line: 0.050 kg.

Common mistakes and what they cost

The figures are for 150 portions of qutab a week.

1. No loss percentage. The card lists spinach as "0.090 kg". That is net, while the cook takes 0.120 kg. The card says a portion costs 1.34 ₼, but in reality it is 1.46 ₼. Meanwhile 150 × 0.030 = 4.5 kg of spinach "vanishes" from stock every week, which is 18 ₼. A shortage like that is very easy to mistake for theft.
2. Portions "by eye". The card says 20 g of butter, but the cook brushes on a generous 35 g. That is +0.21 ₼ a portion and 31.50 ₼ a week, and food cost climbs from 29.2% to 33.4%.
3. New supplier, old card. The new supplier's spinach has more stalks, so the loss is 40% instead of 25%. To get the same 90 g net you now need 150 g gross. The portion goes up to 1.58 ₼, while the card still shows the old figure. After every supplier change, clean and weigh one batch and update the loss.
4. Mixed units. Herbs are bought by the bunch, but the card is in kilograms. Weigh a bunch once: if a 0.60 ₼ bunch weighs 100 g, the price is 6.00 ₼/kg. Record eggs either always in pieces or always in kilograms.
5. No cards for sauces and modifiers. The "with qatıq" option takes 80 g of qatıq every time, which is 0.28 ₼ at 3.50 ₼/kg. Without a card, that money never shows up anywhere.
6. The card lives in the chef's notebook. Or nowhere at all, only in the chef's head. A recipe card belongs where everyone can see it, with a version and a date.

Recipe cards in an RMS: automatic stock deduction and margin per dish

A paper card helps the cook. A card inside a restaurant management system also runs your stock and your money. In Dishment's Warehouse and recipes module, it works like this:

• Gross, loss % and net on every card. Net is calculated automatically: gross × (1 − loss). There is a field for preparation notes, while the photo and allergens live on the dish itself in the menu.
• Every sale deducts ingredients. A paid order deducts its ingredients by the card, at gross weight. If the internet drops, the till keeps working, and the deduction happens once the hub syncs with the cloud. See offline mode for details. Sell 150 portions of qutab in a week and 18 kg of spinach, 9 kg of herbs and 3 kg of butter leave stock.
• Cost and margin at average purchase cost. You had 10 kg of spinach at 4.00 ₼, and a new delivery brought 10 kg more at 5.00 ₼, so the average is now 4.50 ₼. The qutab cost rises to 1.52 ₼ on its own and food cost shows 30.4%. Nothing to update by hand in a spreadsheet.
• Modifiers and combos. The "with qatıq" modifier has its own card, added to every portion where it is chosen. A combo is deducted by the cards of the parts chosen. Dishes sold by weight can have a card per 1 kg sold.
• Dishes without a card are listed separately. In the report their sales count at zero cost, so it pays to empty that list.
• A stock count shows the difference. The book balance sits next to what you counted, with the difference in manat. When the cards are right, that difference shows real loss, not card errors.