What is a recipe?

Back in 2012, I started looking for recipe software for my restaurants. The only thing I could find, other than home cook apps, was back-office inventory systems that happened to include a section labeled "recipes." And in every case, the "recipe" was basically a list of ingredients with their individual costs. The rest of it, the parts that actually matter for execution, production, training, scaling, iteration? There was none of that.

So, on November 10th, 2015, I incorporated meez. Though it would be another five years before it was live in kitchens.

The wrong tool for the job

Don't get me wrong. A good back-office system is essential for running a restaurant. But the feeling I kept coming back to was: why would I use a finance tool to manage my product development? My training? My R&D? My IP?

It's like putting car engine specs into QuickBooks and expecting your engineers to work out of that software to design and build the car. That would clearly never happen. And I'm pretty sure we wouldn't ask accountants to help design a tool built for the intricacies of actually building a car.

A recipe is absolutely no different.

The result is that the "recipes" added to these back-office systems are almost never the actual recipe. Chefs are not pulling up their P&L software in the kitchen and following the steps to brine duck legs for confit on the next screen. So what lives in those systems is a financial abstraction. Not the thing that actually gets cooked. And it's typically added by someone who isn't the chef who created or updated the recipe. I'll save the downstream effects that has on accuracy for another post.

But given how often we search Google, or LLMs now, for "recipe management software" and land on these back-office systems, it begs the question:

What is a recipe?

Really, though, what is a recipe?

To be clear, we're talking about recipes in the context of professional kitchens.

A recipe is certainly not just a list of ingredients used to calculate cost.

It is the explicit way a chef expects something to be executed. Every time. By whoever makes it. It's the clearest possible expression of intent.

A recipe is process. Ratios. Critical control points. And it's fucking technique.

Technique is a huge part of what makes a chef a chef. We learn it throughout our careers. Through repetition, through failure, through iteration, through curiosity, hard work, and through time. And once the kitchen you're running is your food, the recipes we write don't just set expectations. They're also our chance to pass on some of that technique we've learned. To crystallize the little details that matter.

We'll always need hands-on training, coaching, and mentorship. But the recipe is non-negotiable. It's our operating system for every dish we expect our team to make.

Recipes are meant to be mastered, then made your own.

Recipes can sometimes exist purely so we can iterate on them. And paradoxically, mastering a recipe is what allows you to actually change it.

Without that baseline, you're not iterating. You're guessing.

Take something like Nước Chấm, the Vietnamese table sauce. There are probably thousands of versions, and it's a pretty simple sauce. Citrus, chilies, garlic, onion, and of course fish sauce. But you can absolutely screw it up. Knowing a baseline that balances the raw bite of garlic, the kick of the chilies, the acid, the sweetness of palm sugar, and the salty, funky depth of fish sauce is critical. And more importantly, once you find your sweet spot, all the tweaks you made along the way. How hot, what type of fresh chili, what citrus or vinegar, which brand of fish sauce. That's what makes your recipe exactly yours.

Here's mine. I use it as a base and almost always end up adding some crushed toasted peanuts, maybe cilantro or mint. Sometimes in summer, some really ripe diced peaches. It's always changing. But I always have this baseline to come back to.