Part 1 The Kitchen Formula Calculator v4 & The Logical Structure Of A Recipe
The Unabaker’s Admonition
The following begins a rather detailed article that describes the formula writing, recording and calculating tools I have developed. I intend to publish parts of it at a time to make it more digestible. The articles go into a reasonably technical discussion that cooks or bakers with a decent knowledge base about their craft will understand more readily, but because of the novel nature of these tools even those enlightened folk are advised to print this article. The article discusses the origins of these calculating tools, their rationale, format and structure, how they work, and how and why to use them. It proposes a mathematically, logically sensible structure for all recipes performed by cooks and pastry makers, as those used by bread crafters. It constitutes an extended argument for relegating to the list of bad habits (one has managed to overcome) the reliance upon volume measures in all forms of recipe writing and dissemination; cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, website sources, and in practice by home cooks as well as professionals. A reader is advised to download the file, and open the tab labeled Kitchen Formula Calculator v4 to compare these notes to the actual calculating tool as you’re reading along. If you have no patience for The Unabaker’s level of detail, resist learning new things, or you’re just that damn busy, then skip to the final installment of this article to find a step by step user guide, and then, give the calculator a go by entering data from one of your own recipes into the appropriate fields as instructed. The calculators are available for use by anyone that wants to try them out. One way to get the tools is to contact me directly at www.theunabakerspeaks.com, or by email: theuanabaker@icloud.com. These tools are not for sale, they are for use. Just ask!
Part 1
What Is It?
The Kitchen Formula Calculator now updated to v4 is a spreadsheet. Designed by The Unabaker, it’s a tool to help cooks conceive, write, test, and record recipes. It also provides a complimentary table for performing ingredient, recipe and plate costings should that be of interest or required. Besides the calculating tables that comprise the tool, it includes many common ingredient volume to weight conversions for reference, provides a convenient way to record these when formula writing, and solves the annoying problem of having to recalculate ingredient quantities for recipe yield adjustments. To be able to upscale or downscale a recipe yield is necessary in all cooking venues or scenarios, whether at home or in commercial setting. Unfortunately, recipes quite often refer to volume measures of ingredients and/or yield, which make doing such conversions not fun, nor easy. The Kitchen Formula Calculator does the upscaling or downscaling for you, does it accurately, and more. When used regularly, The Kitchen Formula Calculator presents a clear, consistent format for recipe record keeping, or as professional chefs call it, creating a Kitchen Guide, the standard reference to which all staff are trained to follow. You probably have an equivalent in your home, perhaps looking more like a scrapbook than guidebook. The Kitchen Formula Calculator is a tidy and organized layout for writing or recording recipes. It makes creating and using your kitchen guidebook easier. As with all of The Unabaker’s other calculating tools, these are not for sale, they’re for use. If you want to use it, do so. If you have questions about how to use it, or problems when using it, contact me. You can find more information on The Unabaker YouTube channel.
The Kitchen Formula Calculator is particularly helpful for refining a recipe; the micro-adjustments Chef’s often make to dial in a recipe after an initial test. In professional kitchens this is a vital part of the recipe development phase. Most home cooks are likewise familiar with doing this, but more informally. Recording the refinements made while also keeping the original starting point, and steps along the way creates a breadcrumb trail useful during the ongoing testing, which can sometimes require multiples of tests before the Chef is satisfied enough to enter it into the Kitchen Guide. This calculating tool allows a user to alter a recipe’s flavor or rheological profile in precise, incremental fashion, increasing or decreasing certain of the ingredient quantities to punch up or mute their affect upon the result, or to alter the consistency, thickness, gelling or other textural features. The tool makes it easy to add or subtract ingredients, or to substitute alternate ingredients from those originally specified. It's a very useful creative development tool. If you want to track the step-by-step development of a recipe, this is a critical record keeping device for that process. It does so in very organized fashion. The Kitchen Formula Calculator functions also as a blank template to create entirely new recipes.
Another valuable feature of The Kitchen Formula Calculator is how it addresses the problem, regularly encountered, of having to make adjustments to a recipe to yield more or less than the given amount. This calculating tool allows the cook to make yield adjustments to a recipe as desired. It does so instantaneously, and precisely. This singular feature alone is noteworthy because many recipes and formulae are written using volume measures. Volume measurements are inherently imprecise and approximate, making conversion to weight measures accordingly imprecise. Even if not converting to weights, the process of upscaling a recipe yield is not so simple. If you need to double a formula, it’s pretty simple, but increasing or decreasing formula yield in increments is not. Stated yields for recipes that have been written in cups, spoons and beakers full of stuff are not easily adjustable, whereas the need to increase or decrease recipe yield is an everyday feature in any sort of production scenario. Home cooks deal with it all the time, as do professionals. Over-production costs money, under-production means lost sales, or not enough to cover the number of attendees at a function; an egregious, and possibly employment ending event. Properly calculating recipe yield is important. As the required number of portions required increases, so too the wisdom of properly calculating portion size, and the extended quantities needed for each component of a plate; doing so ahead of time as part of an organized production plan. “Yield” and “portions” are two different things. More about that later.
Doing so seems like it ought to be easy, right? It's not. There are variables, not least of which, humans are involved. Guests in attendance fluctuate, changing daily, up to and oftentimes right before an event starts. Chefs are human. Mistakes get made. “Thin to win” means, if suddenly during dinner service or during the plate up for an event, it’s realized there isn’t enough roast remaining to slice to the desired portion size, and feed all the attendees, or enough sauce to anoint each slice, then just change the portion sizes, or 86 the item. This last resort is not an option for a booked event with the expectation that everyone gets fed, and none of these options amount to a happy strategy. Producing enough stuff is basic to any operation. A fact of everyday life in kitchens. Better it's done accurately, ahead of time, than in the midst of service. The Kitchen Formula Calculator is quite useful. It does this for you, reliably. Though it will precisely calculate increased or decreased yields as circumstance necessitates, normal prudence still applies. Any experienced Chef will always add a buffer, some degree of overproduction to account for slip-ups along the way. This might be a 5% to 10% margin of error, depending upon each Chef’s best judgment, and level of nerve.
The History Of The Kitchen Formula Calculator's Development
Over the past 20 years The Unabaker has designed three unique recipe formatting, development, recording, and calculating tools. The first two of these are specific for Baker's and Pastry Chefs. One of which, dubbed The Unabaker’s Master Formula Calculator, is strictly for bread crafting, and is now in its v17, 17th update iteration. The Bake Shop Formula Calculator was designed to be used for non-bread, flour-based pastry preparations, of which there are many, but updates to the third, The Kitchen Formula Calculator, allowed me to incorporate The Bake Shop calculator into it, thus it is no longer in use. The Kitchen Formula Calculator is the most recent development of the three. It’s designed for use with all types of recipes, not bread. The sorts of stuff that comprise the vast majority of cooking operations, i.e. what cooks make, the savory stuff. Thus, a point of distinction between the calculators is the area of food production to which each applies. The following discussion describes some characteristics for each. As noted in the short foreword, printing the page with the calculator template will make simpler the task of following along and understanding the entire article. Words are useful things, but images can help make them understood.
The Unabaker’s Master Formula Calculator is the name given to the bread crafting tool that has been in continuous stages of development for the past 20 years. The layout of this calculator, and the basic user operations involved are refinements that subsequently became elements of the two that followed, but this one, specially designed for bread baker’s, has more going on in it due to the complexities of bread crafting. It can be used for simple direct mix breads such as are common to all bakers, especially the amateur, but also for breads built upon complex multi-stage developments employed by more advanced bakers. The Unabaker’s Master Formula Calculator has as it’s foundation the concept of Baker’s Percentages, a special Baker’s Math that compares the weights of each individual ingredient to the total weight of flour used in a formula, then expresses that comparison as a ratio, a “baker’s percentage”. Use it for any sort of bread, leavened or not. Learn how to use this calculator, and The Kitchen Formula Calculator, being derivative, will come easily, or learn the simpler kitchen calculator first, and apply the understanding to the bread craft version afterwards. It depends upon where you need to start.
Baker’s Percentages provide the analytical basis for comparing similar formulae. If you study cooking, making comparisons of expert techniques and recipes is a useful habit. Have you ever looked up a recipe on the web for a cookie you like, or for making pie dough? If so, you’ve no doubt found more than a handful from different sources to peruse before deciding which one suits your fancy. But how do folks make that decision? Usually by referencing one’s “fancy” again; nothing more scientific or insightful. Using ingredient Baker’s Percentages provides better understanding, and it's educational as well.
Both The Unabaker’s Master Formula Calculator and The Kitchen Formula Calculator are excellent formula writing, formula recording, and formula adjusting tools. If you're writing a cookbook, there's no more organized way to insure error free calculations and transcriptions of handwritten or typed recipe entries for proofreading and final print. A good recipe manual, or cookbook should have a single clear recipe format. These two calculators provide that. Use these to record your recipes, and do away with the years of developmental iterations I endured (or the scraps of paper and magazine cut-outs that comprise most home baker’s recipe collections). If designing a recipe logbook for use at home, or for your production staff to use when there’s money on the line, there's no better tool than these calculators.
The Kitchen Formula Calculator relies upon a concept that I developed called “Cook’s Percentages”. The goal was to reveal the underlying math, the logic of the formula, in the same clear fashion as for bread making, and to be able to use this logic in the same manner; to write, to analyze, to develop, to test, and to record recipes, but with a different point of focus. It applies to kitchen production.
The Kitchen Formula Calculator is designed to be used for recipes that comprise the vast majority of cooking preparations that take place in the savory kitchen, though it can also be usefully employed for all Bake Shop formulae that are non-flour based; fruit, sugar, cream, and eggs comprise the basis of many formulae in the pastry shop.
The Kitchen Formula Calculator, using Cook’s Percentages, is a way to express common cooking formulae in mathematical form, just as Baker’s Percentages do for bread making. Ratios underlie all of cooking, the hidden logic of any recipe. Ratios of ingredients to each other, and to the whole are as important in kitchen procedures as for bread making, but the underlying math and logical structures have never been given. As a result, if analysis of what’s going on in a recipe is required, the cook has to figure it out more or less roughly, and since these sorts of recipes often eschew using weight measures in favor of volume measures (or a combination of both), doing so is complicated, and the result has been the ongoing trouble of upscaling or downscaling the stated recipe yield. The Kitchen Formula Calculator is a unique way of addressing this issue. It provides a user the same format for recording these recipes as for all others in the Bread Shop and Pastry Shop. This minimizes the amount of “eye training” involved in fathoming new document forms, aids comprehension, reduces errors. This may seem a small virtue to the average cook, especially ones without experience in larger operations, but organizing and training a full brigade of dozens of cooks is a different matter. A single standardized format in an operation is as possible as it is desirable.
Each of the calculators relies upon slightly different assumptions that reflect the unique nature of the types of food preparations they’re designed to accommodate. For example, the concept of hydration percentage, fundamental to bread making, and to The Unabaker’s Master Formula Calculator is an analytical aspect that’s unnecessary for most of the world of savory food preparation for which The Kitchen Formula Calculator is designed. It’s a detail bread baker’s want to know, but for cooks it’s insignificant. Cook's don't normally evaluate one chowder versus another based on hydration. One simply notes a New England clam chowder to be thicker than Manhattan style, or this cook’s chowder is somewhat thicker than that cook’s, but the degree of variance is understood to be largely a matter of preference, and the cook has a good deal of leeway to determine it, not to mention the ability to make ongoing changes after the cooking process begins. This happy-go-luckiness does not apply to such Bake Shop stuff as pie dough or custard. Too much, or too little water for pie dough, or cream or eggs for custard makes an important difference, and of course, once in the oven, tinkering is not an option. Both calculators make seeing ingredient ratios, and managing them, perfectly clear and easy, but with different points of production focus.
In the next installment of this series I will discuss what are the essential elements of a formula, aka recipe, and consider it as argument form.
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