What Recipes & prep is for
Recipes & prep records what goes into each dish and each prep item your kitchen makes. A dish's allergens then come from its ingredients, and change when an ingredient's allergens change. The same record holds its shelf life, its storage and the ingredients list for its label.
It is in the sidebar under Operations, after Deliveries, with two pages: Dishes and Prep items. It works from your allergen chart, so it needs the Allergens module. If you can't see it, an owner can switch it on under Settings > Modules.
Dishes, prep items and products
Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
Dish | What you serve. Dishes are the rows on your allergen chart. |
Prep item | Something the kitchen makes to use in dishes, such as a sauce, a dressing or a pizza base. One prep item can go into many dishes, and into other prep items. |
Product | Something you buy in, with the allergens its pack lists. Products sit in the Bought-in products view of the allergen chart. |
A recipe's ingredients can be products, prep items or other dishes. Paddl won't save a recipe that would end up inside itself.
Adding a dish or prep item
On Dishes or Prep items, click New dish or New prep item and choose how to start:
Create with Paddy. Say what goes in it, such as "bacon and brie toastie on sourdough with honey mustard", and Paddy drafts the recipe from your products.
Upload recipe cards. A photo or PDF of recipe cards, a spec book or prep sheets. Paddy reads every recipe in it, and you check each match.
Create manually. Open a blank recipe and add the ingredients yourself.
You can save a recipe with only a name and finish it later. If an ingredient isn't on your chart yet, add it as a new product from the ingredient search, with the allergens its pack lists.
The recipe panel
Tab | What it holds |
|---|---|
Ingredients | Each ingredient in order, with an amount and a unit. Before you save, it shows what the item will contain and what saving adds or takes off. |
Allergens | What the ingredients bring, and which ingredient brings each one. Add anything they don't cover, such as a garnish or cross-contact in the fryer. |
Label | A preview of the label's ingredients list, and its wording. |
Details | Name, category, method, how much it makes, portion size, shelf life once made, storage, defrost time, which labels it prints, and meat content for a meat product. |
Used in | The dishes and prep items this one goes into. |
The list shows each recipe's next step, such as Add ingredients, Check allergens or Add shelf life, so you can see what is left to do.
How allergens roll up
A dish contains what its ingredients contain, plus anything you added on its Allergens tab. May contain works the same way, except that an allergen the dish contains is not listed again as may contain.
Gains show at once. When an ingredient gains an allergen, say a supplier adds sesame to a bun, every prep item and dish that uses it gains it straight away: on the chart, your menus, the public allergen page, exports and the next labels you print.
Removals wait for a person. When an ingredient stops bringing an allergen, such as after a swap or a corrected spec, the dishes that used it keep showing it. Paddl raises an alert and the recipe shows Confirm allergen change. Open it, choose Review, check the allergen really is gone, and click Confirm removal.
Your own changes are confirmed as you save. If you change the ingredients and an item would lose an allergen, the panel lists every item that loses one before you save. Saving confirms them.
An allergen an ingredient brings stays. You can't untick it on the Allergens tab. Change or remove the ingredient instead. The allergens you added yourself you can remove.
Sub-allergens count too. A dish that loses walnuts but keeps another tree nut still has a removal to confirm.
Off the allergen chart until checked
If an ingredient's allergens are still a guess that nobody has checked, such as a product read off a delivery note, every dish that uses it stays off your allergen chart and the public allergen page until someone checks it against the pack. The panel names the ingredient to check. A new dish with no ingredients stays off too, until its ingredients are in and checked or you confirm its allergens by hand.
Labels
The Label tab builds the ingredients list for food prepacked for direct sale (PPDS) from the recipe. Ingredients are in order of weight, and every allergen is named and shown in bold. It tells you what stops the list being exact, such as an ingredient with no amount or a cereal or nut that needs naming.
Choose Write my own to word the list yourself. If the ingredients change later, Paddl asks you to check your wording still matches. Until the warnings are fixed, sale labels print without an ingredients list.
On the Details tab, Labels sets what the item prints: a prep label, a sale label (PPDS) or both. Meat products show their meat content on sale labels.
Categories
Click Edit categories to group your dishes and prep items, for example Mains, Sauces or Bakery. Categories also go to your label printer. Deleting a category keeps its recipes, with no category.
In the app
Everyone at the business can look recipes up in the app under Library > Recipes & prep: ingredients, allergens, shelf life, storage, method and the label ingredients list, which they can copy. The app keeps a copy for when the connection drops. Managers can change shelf life and storage there. Everything else is changed on the web.
Asking Paddy
Ask Paddy to find a recipe, draft one, change its ingredients or method, or set its shelf life, for example "the tomato sauce keeps 3 days chilled". Paddy won't make a change that takes an allergen off a dish. It sends you to the recipe, where you see and confirm each one.
Recipes from head office
If your business is part of an organisation, some dishes and prep items may come from head office. They follow the same rules, with some parts looked after by head office. See Group recipes and prep.