Recipes made of recipes

Most kitchens do not go straight from raw goods to a plate. They make a bolognese on Monday and it turns up in three dishes; they make a stock and it goes into the bolognese. Aura follows that all the way down.

Write the prep item as its own recipe

Give the thing you make a product of its own — "House bolognese" — set Counted in to ml, and leave Active off so it never appears on the till or the customer menu. Then write its recipe like any other, with one extra field: one batch makes.

That number is the whole trick. Without it, "200 ml of bolognese" is a quantity of nothing in particular; with it, 200 ml is a twentieth of the batch, so it is a twentieth of the mince.

Then use it like an ingredient

Selling one Carbonara now takes 105 g of mince and 78 ml of passata off the shelf. The bolognese itself never moves, because nobody counts bolognese — the recipe list says so plainly: the line reads "expands" rather than a quantity, and underneath, One portion really takes lists the raw goods.

Change one recipe and every dish that uses it follows. That is the point: the sauce is written once.

The one switch that changes everything

Whether Aura stops at the sauce or reaches through it is Track stock on the sauce:

• Not counted (the usual case for something made to order): the dish reaches

through to the raw goods.

• Counted (you batch it, weigh it and write it on the board): the sauce is stock.

The dish deducts sauce, and making more sauce is its own event.

Both are right, for different kitchens. Nothing else has to change — flip the checkbox and the arithmetic follows.

What this fixes

Before this, a shared sauce silently did nothing. The recipe read correctly, the dish listed the sauce, and no stock moved at all — because nobody counts sauce, so there was nothing to deduct, and the mince inside it was never reached. No stock movement, no low-stock warning, no dish taken off when the mince ran out, and a food-cost report that showed a kitchen wasting nothing. A recipe that looks right and does nothing is worse than no recipe, because you trust it.

Two things Aura will not let you do

A loop. If the bolognese uses stock and the stock uses bolognese, no quantity can ever be worked out. Saving that is refused, naming the ingredient that closes the loop.

Impossible fractions. Ingredients are stated in grams and millilitres for a reason (§36). A gram of a four-litre batch is not representable in whole grams, so it rounds to nothing — say it in the unit the shelf is counted in and the arithmetic stays exact.