Prep — the building blocks

A prep is a recipe that exists to be used inside other recipes — a blackening spice, a pickled onion, a mother sauce. Prep lists them separately from Production recipes, with used in showing how many recipes depend on each one.

Preps are a type of recipe, not a different kind of object. They are authored in the same editor, carry the same ingredients, steps and allergens, and go through the same review and publishing. What differs is their role: a Production recipe is a dish a guest orders; a prep is a component your kitchen makes.

Why they are separate

Three things follow from a prep being its own record rather than a paragraph inside each recipe that uses it:

• One source of truth. Change the blackening spice once and every dish using it changes. The alternative is the same ratio written into six recipes, five of which get updated.
• Allergens roll up through them. A prep’s allergens flow into every recipe that contains it, so a dish inherits the allergens of a component it never lists directly. This is the part that is hard to do by hand and easy to get wrong.
• The line can be told to make them. A prep can be put on a menu’s prep list and appears on the kitchen’s own Prep tab, which is what a cook works from at the start of a shift.

Authoring one

New Prep creates one; Import brings them in with the rest of a recipe book. The status filters are the same as Production — All, Draft, In review, Published — and a prep must be published before another recipe can rely on it reaching the line.

Instead of Front-of-House sections, preps group by prep sections, which are their own tags. That is deliberate: a prep list is organised by where and when it is made, not by where a dish sits on the guest menu.

Nesting

A prep can contain another prep — a sauce inside a dressing inside a dish. Allergens roll up the whole way, so the outermost recipe still declares correctly.

Keep the chain shallow enough that a cook can follow it. Two levels reads clearly on the line; four means someone has to open four cards to make one dish.

Adding one to a recipe

In the recipe editor, the ingredient picker offers preps alongside ingredients, and will offer Create prep for something that does not exist yet — so you can write a dish and define its components as you go rather than building the catalog first.

On the menu

Preps are assigned to a menu separately from its items, because the preps a location needs on hand are not simply every prep used by every dish — some are delivered, some are made in bulk weekly. See Menus and versions.

Related

• The ingredient catalog — ingredients are bought; preps are made
• Getting a recipe onto the line — preps follow the same path