What a Recipe Costs, and Why Nobody Says

The gap between what a recipe asks you to buy and what the dish actually costs is wider than most people assume, and it is not the ingredients that make it wide. It is the pack sizes.

The pack size problem

A recipe calling for 115g of butter is costing you a 250g block, and the arithmetic every food writer quietly does is to price the 115g and ignore the rest. That is the correct way to do it, and almost nobody shows their working, which is why two recipes for the same dish can differ by a factor of three on cost.

The calculator on every recipe page here does that arithmetic out loud. Enter the pack price and the pack size, and it prices the quantity the recipe actually uses. Change a price to the one at your own shop and the figure moves as you type.

Why the sale price field exists

Because a good number of the people reading this are selling what they bake. A bake sale, a market stall, a recipe box. The margin row appears the moment a sale price goes in, and it is usually the first time anyone has seen the two numbers next to each other.