Auto calculation of recipe weight (and volume)

When you use different units for the ingredients in your recipe, it’s difficult to know the exact weight of your recipe. Apicbase can auto-calculate this for you. Read along to learn more about it.

As always, everything starts with having the data at the ingredient level. In the "Packages & Pricing" tab for each ingredient, you can enter pieces, weight, and volume. If you want to learn more about adding package and pricing information, read this article. The relation between all of these measurements is very important for the software to be able to auto calculate the total weight of a recipe. We advise to always fill out at least a weight or a volume. 

How exactly does Apicbase calculate the weight of a recipe?

• For ingredients already expressed in mass (g, kg, ...): In this case, the software converts the mass to grams (g).
• For ingredients expressed in volume (cl, l, ...): First, the software will check if the ingredient has a custom conversion defined for converting from volume to mass (e.g. the package for the ingredient "milk" has a volume of 1l but a weight of 1.03kg). In this case, the volume if converted to mass according to this conversion factor and then converted to grams (g). In case there is no custom conversion set, the software falls back to the default conversion of water which is 1l = 1kg.
• You can see the Conversion Ratio in the "General Tab".
  
  
• For ingredients expressed in pieces: This is a very important one! When you use, for example, eggs, you can enter this as pieces in your recipe. However, the software needs to find a conversion for pieces to mass or volume, which means that on ingredient level, you will have to enter that 1 egg = x grams or that a carton of 6 eggs has a certain weight.