Baking Calculator

A friend of mine going to culinary school asked me if I could make a calculator for one of his recipes. The goal was that based on the amount of bread used the rest of the ingredients would auto-populate.  I just worked one out in a few minutes, this is what it looks like:

 

 

The following is the original hard-coded data provided for my friend in the recipe. He originally had a pound column which I converted to Oz, where the number 64 for the bread is. Other than that the box was his creation:

 

 

One I have the reference number of Oz, I determined to figure out what the percentage of each ingredient was. My friend had is as 168.70% since this seems some guideline they use to measure the ingredients, but I’m not familiar with it and didn’t help me with the calculator:

 

 

The next box focuses on knowing what the percentage left over for all of the rest of the ingredients combined is. Based on this, I determined the percentage of the leftover ingredients, the decimal number I needed to use to multiply the bread to give me the number of actual Oz left over for all other ingredients, and from this the total Oz of the new batch. The calculator takes into consideration the total amount of Oz used and what percentage of that ingredient it’s supposed to be part of and auto populates its required amount after pasting the Oz of bread:

 

 

For the last box we have the calculator, you put in the amount of Oz of bread you will use and the rest of the ingredients auto-calculate. First box shows original data is the same as hard-coded inputs, the second sees how it’s adjusted:

 

 

The last picture shows the formulas I used:

Here’s an example copy of the document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_mk6JJoXZBGc1_7H6dp2rErYP0ZQx-rrCDtLa-Z0rR0/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

I typed this version up in a few minutes, I’ll probably work on a calculator that you can fill in the ingredients and figure out the requirements yourself based on this. An interesting one could be soups were water will be the determiner for the rest of the ingredients.

Posted in Blog Posts, Business/Finance, Programming.