Using a prep inside a recipe

A prep only earns its keep once something uses it. This is how that works, and what to know before you change one.

Adding a prep to a recipe

In the recipe editor, the ingredient picker offers preps alongside ingredients — you do not go anywhere else. Type the name, pick the prep, give it a quantity, exactly as you would for an ingredient.

If it does not exist yet, the picker offers Create prep inline, so you can write a dish and define its components as you go rather than building a library first. See Writing a recipe.

⚠ A prep must be published before a recipe relying on it can reach the line. A draft prep is invisible to cooks, so a published dish pointing at one leaves a hole exactly where the build should be.

What nesting gives you

Three things follow from a prep being a record rather than a paragraph:

• One source of truth. Change the blackening spice once and every dish using it changes. The alternative is the same ratio typed into six recipes, five of which get updated.
• Allergens roll up through it. A dish containing a rémoulade containing egg declares Eggs, without anyone tagging the dish. See Allergens.
• The line can be told to make it. A prep on a menu’s prep list appears on the kitchen’s own Prep tab, which is what a cook works from at the start of a shift.

“Used in” is your blast radius

The Prep list shows used in — how many recipes depend on each one. Read it before you edit.

A prep used in one dish is a local change. A prep used in fourteen is fourteen dishes whose spec just moved, fourteen re-acknowledgments on the line, and potentially a new allergen appearing on dishes nobody was thinking about.

Neither is wrong. But they are different decisions, and the number is how you tell which one you are making.

Keep the chain shallow

A prep can contain another prep. Allergens roll up the whole way, so correctness holds at any depth — but legibility does not.

Two levels reads fine on the line: a dish, and the sauce in it. Four means a cook opens four cards to make one plate, during service, with their hands full. If you find yourself nesting deeply, the question is usually whether the middle layer is a real thing your kitchen makes or just a way of organising a list.

Changing a prep that is already live

1. Check used in — know how many dishes you are about to move.
2. Edit and publish the prep as you would any recipe; it goes through the same review.
3. Expect coverage to dip across every dish that contains it. That is the line being asked to re-read specs that genuinely changed.
4. If the change alters allergens, say so in the revision note. The dishes that inherit it will not mention it themselves.

Related

• Prep — the building blocks
• Menus and versions — prep is assigned to a menu separately from its items