Recipe for Growth: How to Improve the Number Skills of Your Chefs
When we think about cooking, we often focus on ingredients and methods. However, something else plays a huge role in a commercial kitchen: maths – it’s essential for anyone who spends time cooking, especially those who want to become professional chefs. Number skills for chefs are often missing; this article will show you how to address this.
In the kitchen, maths helps us with everything from adjusting the number of servings in a recipe to calculating the cost of a dish to managing stock and ordering. Good numeracy skills can also be very helpful in our everyday life outside the kitchen. They help us manage our money, compare shopping prices, and understand loans and credit.
Many people in hospitality are not strong with numbers – hospo people are ready for action, talking and making things. If they loved maths they would have gone into banking and finance! But we can’t just accept this – everyone involved in production needs to be good at doing sums – here’s a bunch of ways to help them improve. If you find your head chef is weak in this area, call it out privately and make an improvement plan – the future of a head chef is limited if they can’t do accurate food costing or budgets and talk numbers with the boss.
Better number skills can also help everyone in their personal life, for example:
Comparing prices in supermarkets, understanding offers and discounts.
Understanding interest rates on loans and credit cards
Paying off debt – how to prioritise payments to save money
Understanding mortgages – interest rates, fixed vs. variable rates, and repayment terms
Where number skills are needed in kitchen management.
Recipe Scaling and Adaptation: Scaling recipes up or down depending on the servings needed. Adjusting recipes according to specific dietary needs or ingredient availability.
Portion Control: Divide a prepared dish into specific serving sizes to ensure consistency in taste and presentation. It also helps control food cost per serving, critical for maintaining profitability.
Stock Management: Chefs must track the ingredients used, predict future usage, and place accurate orders to avoid food waste or shortages.
Costing and Pricing: A strong grasp of numbers helps calculate ingredient costs, overheads, and desired profit margins.
Nutritional Calculations: Understanding how to calculate calories, macronutrients, and portion sizes can help chefs cater to their customers’ dietary needs.
Time Management: Numeracy skills can help with precise cook timing and coordination of tasks.
Career Development: Many chefs aspire to run their own restaurants someday. Strong numeracy skills are crucial for business planning, budgeting, and financial management.
Topics to cover in training number skills for chefs:
Basic Arithmetic: Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This will be the foundation for much of the course.
Fractions, Decimals, and Percentages: Understanding these are crucial in the kitchen for measuring ingredients, scaling recipes, and calculating cooking times.
Understanding Measurements: This would cover different systems of measurement (imperial and metric), and conversions between different units (e.g., grams to kilograms, ounces to pounds, millilitres to litres).
Recipe Scaling: How to adjust recipes to serve different numbers of people.
Portion Control: Calculating the size and cost of individual servings from a batch of food.
Stock Control and Food Waste: Understanding quantities in ordering, predicting the shelf life of ingredients, managing stock rotation, and reducing waste.
Time Management: Estimating and calculating preparation and cooking times, synchronising different meal elements.
Costing and Pricing: Calculating the cost of ingredients per dish and understanding how to price dishes for a menu to ensure profitability.
Nutritional Information: Basic understanding of how to calculate nutritional information for recipes.
Tips and Service Charges: Understanding how tips and service charges work, their division, and the maths involved.
Taxation: Basic understanding of GST and sales tax as it applies to food and drink in Australia, New Zealand, US or elsewhere.
Practical Calculator Skills: Effective use of a calculator for everyday kitchen maths.
How to teach practical calculator skills to chefs and cooks:
Use the calculator on a mobile phone, and have some colourful calculators with big buttons available in the kitchen. The key to teaching adults with poor numeracy skills is to make the learning relevant to their everyday work and to provide plenty of real-life examples and practical exercises.
What to cover…
Basics of Calculator Use: Start with the basics – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Give them various numerical problems related to the kitchen, such as adding up the cost of ingredients, subtracting the amount of an ingredient used from the total, multiplying to scale up recipes, and dividing to calculate portion sizes.
Exercise: Give them a shopping list for a recipe and ask them to calculate the total cost.
Calculating Percentages: This is useful for understanding food costs, profit margins, and discounts. Show them how to calculate percentages on their calculators.
Exercise: Give them a scenario where they must offer a 10% discount on a meal or calculate the 10% GST on a given price.
Fractions and Decimals: In a kitchen, you often have to deal with fractions (like 1/2 a cup of milk) and decimals (0.75 kg of flour). Teach them how to convert between fractions and decimals on their calculators.
Exercise: Ask them to convert fractions to decimals and vice versa. The fractions and decimals could be quantities in a recipe.
Conversions: Show them how to use their calculator to convert between different units of measure, such as converting ounces to grams or litres to gallons.
Exercise: Provide them with a recipe that uses imperial measurements and ask them to convert it to metric measurements.
Scaling Recipes: Show them how to use their calculator to scale recipes up or down, depending on the number of people they need to serve.
Exercise: Give them a recipe for 4 people and ask them to scale it up for 10 people.
Practice is the key to teaching calculator skills (as with any numeracy skill). Encourage your students to use their calculators in real-life situations as much as possible, not just in the classroom.
Calculation examples with real kitchen situations:
These include the keystrokes as they would be done on a calculator – use these examples to create more…
Recipe Costing: If onions cost $2 per kilogram, carrots are $1.5 per kilogram, and stock is $2 per litre, and a soup recipe requires 0.5 kg of onions, 1 kg of carrots, and 2 litres of vegetable stock, what is the total cost of the recipe?
Solution: Cost of onions: $2 * 0.5 kg, Cost of carrots: $1.5 * 1 kg, Cost of stock: $2 * 2 litres. Sum these to get total cost. Keystrokes: 2 x 0.5 + 1.5 x 1 + 2 x 2 = (Answer: $7)
Scaling Recipes: A cake recipe is designed to feed 8 people, but you need to feed 15 people. If the original recipe calls for 250 grams of flour, 200 grams of sugar, and 100 grams of butter, how much of each ingredient will you need?
Solution: The multiplier is 15 (desired servings) divided by 8 (original servings). Multiply each ingredient by the result. Keystrokes: 15 ÷ 8 x 250 = (for flour, Answer: 468.75g), 15 ÷ 8 x 200 = (for sugar, Answer: 375g), 15 ÷ 8 x 100 = (for butter, Answer: 187.5g)
Unit Conversion: A recipe calls for 2000 grams of flour, 3 kilograms of sugar, and 5000 milligrams of salt. Convert all the measurements to kilograms.
Solution: Convert each ingredient to kg (1 kg = 1000 g, 1 g = 0.001 kg).
Keystrokes: 2000 ÷ 1000 = (for flour, Answer: 2 kg), 5000 x 0.001 = (for salt, Answer: 0.005 kg)
Portion Control: A pasta recipe for 5 people requires 500 grams of pasta, 250 grams of cheese, and 1.25 litres of sauce. How much of each ingredient is in one serving?
Solution: Divide each ingredient by the number of servings (5).
Keystrokes: 500 ÷ 5 = (for pasta, Answer: 100g), 250 ÷ 5 = (for cheese, Answer: 50g), 1.25 ÷ 5 = (for sauce, Answer: 0.25 litres)
Time Management: A roast dinner recipe involves roasting a 2 kg chicken (1.5 hours), boiling potatoes (20 minutes), and steaming vegetables (15 minutes). When should each component be started if everything needs to be ready simultaneously?
Solution: Subtract each component’s cooking time from the total time (1.5 hours or 90 minutes). Keystrokes: 90 – 20 = (for potatoes, Answer: Start 70 minutes before serving), 90 – 15 = (for vegetables, Answer: Start 75 minutes before serving)
Inventory Management: If you have 25 kg of rice and each serving of a dish requires 150 grams, how many servings can you make?
Solution: The number of servings is 25 kg (rice available) divided by 150 grams (per serving), noting that 1 kg equals 1000 grams. Keystrokes: 25 x 1000 ÷ 150 = (Answer: 166.66 servings, which could be rounded to 166 servings)
Batch Cooking: If a recipe designed to serve 6 people uses 1.5 kg of meat, 1 kg of vegetables, and 500 grams of sauce, and you want to cook 4 batches, how much of each ingredient will you need?
Solution: Multiply each ingredient by the number of batches (4). Keystrokes: 1.5 x 4 = (for meat, Answer: 6 kg), 1 x 4 = (for vegetables, Answer: 4 kg), 0.5 x 4 = (for sauce, Answer: 2 kg)
Price Comparison: If a 1-litre bottle of olive oil costs $8 and a 750 ml bottle costs $6, which is cheaper per litre?
Solution: For the 1-litre bottle, the cost per litre is $8. The cost per litre for the 750 ml bottle is $6 divided by 0.75 litres. Keystrokes: 6 ÷ 0.75 = (for the 750 ml bottle, Answer: $8)
Both bottles are the same price per litre.
Recipe Conversion: A recipe calls for 500 grams of flour, 250 grams of sugar, and 125 grams of butter. Convert all the measurements to kilograms.
Solution: Convert each ingredient to kg (1 kg = 1000 g). Keystrokes: 500 ÷ 1000 = (for flour, Answer: 0.5 kg), 250 ÷ 1000 = (for sugar, Answer: 0.25 kg), 125 ÷ 1000 = (for butter, Answer: 0.125 kg)
Nutritional Information: A salad recipe for 4 people calls for 400 grams of lettuce (5 kcal per 100g), 200 grams of tomatoes (18 kcal per 100g), and 100 grams of cheese (350 kcal per 100g). What’s the calorie content for one serving?
Solution: Calculate the total calories for each ingredient, then add them together, and divide by 4. Keystrokes: 400 x 5 ÷ 100 + 200 x 18 ÷ 100 + 100 x 350 ÷ 100 = (for total kcal, Answer: 137 kcal), 137 ÷ 4 = (per serving, Answer: 34.25 kcal)
Software tools and apps that can help with calculations and reports.
These tools are powerful, but it’s still important for chefs to understand the numbers involved – you need to understand the principles behind what a tool is doing to use it effectively. Software tools include…
Spreadsheets: Tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets can automatically perform various calculations. Chefs can use spreadsheets to manage inventory, scale recipes, track expenses, and calculate nutritional information.
Recipe Management Software: These can manage and scale recipes but also provide detailed nutritional analysis, cost breakdowns, and valuable insights.
Inventory Management Software: They can track the usage of ingredients, generate orders, predict future needs, and provide detailed reports.
Point of Sale Systems: They often include features that help with management tasks. For example, they might track sales and inventory in real-time, calculate the cost of goods sold, and even analyse sales patterns.
Online Converters: Some online tools and apps can convert between different units of measurement. These can be handy for chefs working with recipes that use unfamiliar units.
Questions to ask applicants for a restaurant manager or head chef position.
1. If a recipe is designed to serve 4 people, but you need to serve a party of 15, how would you adjust the quantity of each ingredient?
2. Let’s say a dish costs $4.50 in ingredients and you want to achieve a food cost percentage of 30%. At what price should you list the dish on the menu?
3. How many batches can we make if we order 30 kg of potatoes and use 2 kg for each batch of fries?
4. Imagine our restaurant seats 50 people. If we have an average table turn rate of 3 times per night, and the average spend per person is $25, what would our daily revenue be?
5. What would our new budget be if we need to reduce our monthly operating expenses by 15% and our current expenses are $8,000?
6. A recipe calls for 300 grams of sugar, but we only have a 2 kg bag. How many times can we prepare this recipe with the sugar available?
In conclusion, cooking might seem far from a maths class, but the two are connected.
Work with your chefs to help them improve their number skills, and the benefits will go straight to the bottom line. From adjusting recipes to managing kitchen budgets, numeracy skills can make a real difference in a chef’s work. Being good with numbers can also help our everyday lives, from budgeting personal finances and helping kids with homework to understanding deals in the supermarket. Number skills for chefs work across so many levels!
When we think about cooking, we often focus on ingredients and methods. However, something else plays a huge role in a commercial kitchen: maths – it’s essential for anyone who spends time cooking, especially those who want to become professional chefs. Number skills for chefs are often missing; this article will show you how to address this.
In the kitchen, maths helps us with everything from adjusting the number of servings in a recipe to calculating the cost of a dish to managing stock and ordering. Good numeracy skills can also be very helpful in our everyday life outside the kitchen. They help us manage our money, compare shopping prices, and understand loans and credit.
Many people in hospitality are not strong with numbers – hospo people are ready for action, talking and making things. If they loved maths they would have gone into banking and finance! But we can’t just accept this – everyone involved in production needs to be good at doing sums – here’s a bunch of ways to help them improve. If you find your head chef is weak in this area, call it out privately and make an improvement plan – the future of a head chef is limited if they can’t do accurate food costing or budgets and talk numbers with the boss.
Better number skills can also help everyone in their personal life, for example:
Where number skills are needed in kitchen management.
Recipe Scaling and Adaptation: Scaling recipes up or down depending on the servings needed. Adjusting recipes according to specific dietary needs or ingredient availability.
Portion Control: Divide a prepared dish into specific serving sizes to ensure consistency in taste and presentation. It also helps control food cost per serving, critical for maintaining profitability.
Stock Management: Chefs must track the ingredients used, predict future usage, and place accurate orders to avoid food waste or shortages.
Costing and Pricing: A strong grasp of numbers helps calculate ingredient costs, overheads, and desired profit margins.
Nutritional Calculations: Understanding how to calculate calories, macronutrients, and portion sizes can help chefs cater to their customers’ dietary needs.
Time Management: Numeracy skills can help with precise cook timing and coordination of tasks.
Career Development: Many chefs aspire to run their own restaurants someday. Strong numeracy skills are crucial for business planning, budgeting, and financial management.
Topics to cover in training number skills for chefs:
Basic Arithmetic: Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This will be the foundation for much of the course.
Fractions, Decimals, and Percentages: Understanding these are crucial in the kitchen for measuring ingredients, scaling recipes, and calculating cooking times.
Understanding Measurements: This would cover different systems of measurement (imperial and metric), and conversions between different units (e.g., grams to kilograms, ounces to pounds, millilitres to litres).
Recipe Scaling: How to adjust recipes to serve different numbers of people.
Portion Control: Calculating the size and cost of individual servings from a batch of food.
Stock Control and Food Waste: Understanding quantities in ordering, predicting the shelf life of ingredients, managing stock rotation, and reducing waste.
Time Management: Estimating and calculating preparation and cooking times, synchronising different meal elements.
Costing and Pricing: Calculating the cost of ingredients per dish and understanding how to price dishes for a menu to ensure profitability.
Nutritional Information: Basic understanding of how to calculate nutritional information for recipes.
Tips and Service Charges: Understanding how tips and service charges work, their division, and the maths involved.
Taxation: Basic understanding of GST and sales tax as it applies to food and drink in Australia, New Zealand, US or elsewhere.
Practical Calculator Skills: Effective use of a calculator for everyday kitchen maths.
How to teach practical calculator skills to chefs and cooks:
Use the calculator on a mobile phone, and have some colourful calculators with big buttons available in the kitchen. The key to teaching adults with poor numeracy skills is to make the learning relevant to their everyday work and to provide plenty of real-life examples and practical exercises.
What to cover…
Basics of Calculator Use: Start with the basics – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Give them various numerical problems related to the kitchen, such as adding up the cost of ingredients, subtracting the amount of an ingredient used from the total, multiplying to scale up recipes, and dividing to calculate portion sizes. Exercise: Give them a shopping list for a recipe and ask them to calculate the total cost.
Calculating Percentages: This is useful for understanding food costs, profit margins, and discounts. Show them how to calculate percentages on their calculators. Exercise: Give them a scenario where they must offer a 10% discount on a meal or calculate the 10% GST on a given price.
Fractions and Decimals: In a kitchen, you often have to deal with fractions (like 1/2 a cup of milk) and decimals (0.75 kg of flour). Teach them how to convert between fractions and decimals on their calculators. Exercise: Ask them to convert fractions to decimals and vice versa. The fractions and decimals could be quantities in a recipe.
Conversions: Show them how to use their calculator to convert between different units of measure, such as converting ounces to grams or litres to gallons. Exercise: Provide them with a recipe that uses imperial measurements and ask them to convert it to metric measurements.
Scaling Recipes: Show them how to use their calculator to scale recipes up or down, depending on the number of people they need to serve. Exercise: Give them a recipe for 4 people and ask them to scale it up for 10 people.
Practice is the key to teaching calculator skills (as with any numeracy skill). Encourage your students to use their calculators in real-life situations as much as possible, not just in the classroom.
Calculation examples with real kitchen situations:
These include the keystrokes as they would be done on a calculator – use these examples to create more…
Recipe Costing: If onions cost $2 per kilogram, carrots are $1.5 per kilogram, and stock is $2 per litre, and a soup recipe requires 0.5 kg of onions, 1 kg of carrots, and 2 litres of vegetable stock, what is the total cost of the recipe? Solution: Cost of onions: $2 * 0.5 kg, Cost of carrots: $1.5 * 1 kg, Cost of stock: $2 * 2 litres. Sum these to get total cost.
Keystrokes: 2 x 0.5 + 1.5 x 1 + 2 x 2 = (Answer: $7)
Scaling Recipes: A cake recipe is designed to feed 8 people, but you need to feed 15 people. If the original recipe calls for 250 grams of flour, 200 grams of sugar, and 100 grams of butter, how much of each ingredient will you need? Solution: The multiplier is 15 (desired servings) divided by 8 (original servings). Multiply each ingredient by the result.
Keystrokes: 15 ÷ 8 x 250 = (for flour, Answer: 468.75g), 15 ÷ 8 x 200 = (for sugar, Answer: 375g), 15 ÷ 8 x 100 = (for butter, Answer: 187.5g)
Unit Conversion: A recipe calls for 2000 grams of flour, 3 kilograms of sugar, and 5000 milligrams of salt. Convert all the measurements to kilograms. Solution: Convert each ingredient to kg (1 kg = 1000 g, 1 g = 0.001 kg). Keystrokes: 2000 ÷ 1000 = (for flour, Answer: 2 kg), 5000 x 0.001 = (for salt, Answer: 0.005 kg)
Portion Control: A pasta recipe for 5 people requires 500 grams of pasta, 250 grams of cheese, and 1.25 litres of sauce. How much of each ingredient is in one serving? Solution: Divide each ingredient by the number of servings (5). Keystrokes: 500 ÷ 5 = (for pasta, Answer: 100g), 250 ÷ 5 = (for cheese, Answer: 50g), 1.25 ÷ 5 = (for sauce, Answer: 0.25 litres)
Time Management: A roast dinner recipe involves roasting a 2 kg chicken (1.5 hours), boiling potatoes (20 minutes), and steaming vegetables (15 minutes). When should each component be started if everything needs to be ready simultaneously? Solution: Subtract each component’s cooking time from the total time (1.5 hours or 90 minutes).
Keystrokes: 90 – 20 = (for potatoes, Answer: Start 70 minutes before serving), 90 – 15 = (for vegetables, Answer: Start 75 minutes before serving)
Inventory Management: If you have 25 kg of rice and each serving of a dish requires 150 grams, how many servings can you make? Solution: The number of servings is 25 kg (rice available) divided by 150 grams (per serving), noting that 1 kg equals 1000 grams.
Keystrokes: 25 x 1000 ÷ 150 = (Answer: 166.66 servings, which could be rounded to 166 servings)
Batch Cooking: If a recipe designed to serve 6 people uses 1.5 kg of meat, 1 kg of vegetables, and 500 grams of sauce, and you want to cook 4 batches, how much of each ingredient will you need? Solution: Multiply each ingredient by the number of batches (4).
Keystrokes: 1.5 x 4 = (for meat, Answer: 6 kg), 1 x 4 = (for vegetables, Answer: 4 kg), 0.5 x 4 = (for sauce, Answer: 2 kg)
Price Comparison: If a 1-litre bottle of olive oil costs $8 and a 750 ml bottle costs $6, which is cheaper per litre? Solution: For the 1-litre bottle, the cost per litre is $8. The cost per litre for the 750 ml bottle is $6 divided by 0.75 litres.
Keystrokes: 6 ÷ 0.75 = (for the 750 ml bottle, Answer: $8) Both bottles are the same price per litre.
Recipe Conversion: A recipe calls for 500 grams of flour, 250 grams of sugar, and 125 grams of butter. Convert all the measurements to kilograms. Solution: Convert each ingredient to kg (1 kg = 1000 g).
Keystrokes: 500 ÷ 1000 = (for flour, Answer: 0.5 kg), 250 ÷ 1000 = (for sugar, Answer: 0.25 kg), 125 ÷ 1000 = (for butter, Answer: 0.125 kg)
Nutritional Information: A salad recipe for 4 people calls for 400 grams of lettuce (5 kcal per 100g), 200 grams of tomatoes (18 kcal per 100g), and 100 grams of cheese (350 kcal per 100g). What’s the calorie content for one serving? Solution: Calculate the total calories for each ingredient, then add them together, and divide by 4.
Keystrokes: 400 x 5 ÷ 100 + 200 x 18 ÷ 100 + 100 x 350 ÷ 100 = (for total kcal, Answer: 137 kcal), 137 ÷ 4 = (per serving, Answer: 34.25 kcal)
Software tools and apps that can help with calculations and reports.
These tools are powerful, but it’s still important for chefs to understand the numbers involved – you need to understand the principles behind what a tool is doing to use it effectively. Software tools include…
Spreadsheets: Tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets can automatically perform various calculations. Chefs can use spreadsheets to manage inventory, scale recipes, track expenses, and calculate nutritional information.
Recipe Management Software: These can manage and scale recipes but also provide detailed nutritional analysis, cost breakdowns, and valuable insights.
Inventory Management Software: They can track the usage of ingredients, generate orders, predict future needs, and provide detailed reports.
Point of Sale Systems: They often include features that help with management tasks. For example, they might track sales and inventory in real-time, calculate the cost of goods sold, and even analyse sales patterns.
Online Converters: Some online tools and apps can convert between different units of measurement. These can be handy for chefs working with recipes that use unfamiliar units.
Questions to ask applicants for a restaurant manager or head chef position.
1. If a recipe is designed to serve 4 people, but you need to serve a party of 15, how would you adjust the quantity of each ingredient?
2. Let’s say a dish costs $4.50 in ingredients and you want to achieve a food cost percentage of 30%. At what price should you list the dish on the menu?
3. How many batches can we make if we order 30 kg of potatoes and use 2 kg for each batch of fries?
4. Imagine our restaurant seats 50 people. If we have an average table turn rate of 3 times per night, and the average spend per person is $25, what would our daily revenue be?
5. What would our new budget be if we need to reduce our monthly operating expenses by 15% and our current expenses are $8,000?
6. A recipe calls for 300 grams of sugar, but we only have a 2 kg bag. How many times can we prepare this recipe with the sugar available?
In conclusion, cooking might seem far from a maths class, but the two are connected.
Work with your chefs to help them improve their number skills, and the benefits will go straight to the bottom line. From adjusting recipes to managing kitchen budgets, numeracy skills can make a real difference in a chef’s work. Being good with numbers can also help our everyday lives, from budgeting personal finances and helping kids with homework to understanding deals in the supermarket. Number skills for chefs work across so many levels!
Check the other useful blog posts on the Foodie Coaches website…
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