Costing recipes

A friend recently was once talking about recipes and she knew to the penny how much the ingredients cost to make all her dishes. I can mentally think about the ingredients and tell someone roughly but I was really impressed with her methods.

My friend keeps receipts from shopping and checks to see what has changed. I don’t think she does this religiously every week but put her receipts aside until she had a quiet moment to sit down to check. I used to price all my containers in costs per ounce when I was newly married. But over the years, through lack of time and a bigger budget to work with, I had got out of the habit. Although I still had a fair idea of prices and had a fair idea of my recipe costs as already said.

Being on a very low income now, I thought it was an excellent idea and as it is that time of year when I get the spring cleaning bug I decided that one of my jobs was to sort out all my cupboards and price my entire food store.

I designed and completed a spread sheet that listed everything then went through receipts I had in my handbag and purse and jotted down the prices. The items that I didn’t have the prices for and there were quite a few I checked on the supermarket websites. So although some wouldn’t have cost me as much as I had on the spread sheet at least all my cupboard contents were up to current prices.
It took a couple of days to complete but now all I have to do is put in the price of the bought item and the size of the pack I bought. The spread sheet does the rest.

My recipe collection has recipes in metric, imperial and cup measurements. To make pricing recipes easier I then got the spread sheet to work out the prices of 25grams, 1 ounce, individual (lemons for example) and ‘different measurements’.
On the same spreadsheet I have a tool that then works out the costs for the recipes for me.

Also although I have access to a lot of free eggs, herbs, fruit and vegetables I will cost up recipes to include supermarket prices for these items.