Semi-finished products and nested recipes

Name: Semi-finished products and nested recipes
Uploaded: 2026-10-17
Description: How to use one recipe inside another (doughs, creams, bases) with unlimited levels, and how cost, allergens and production carry through.

All plans

How to use one recipe inside another (doughs, creams, bases) with unlimited levels, and how cost, allergens and production carry through.

What it is for

In a bakery almost nothing is made from scratch every time. Croissant dough is used for croissants, pains au chocolat and palmiers; pastry cream fills three products; the biscuit base goes into every cheesecake. These are semi-finished products: recipes used as an ingredient of other recipes.

In Recipok a semi-finished product is a normal recipe that you add inside another one. Its cost, allergens and nutrition information flow automatically into every product that uses it, through as many levels as needed. If you change the cream, all the cakes change.

Before you start

Make a list of the doughs, creams, bases and fillings that are shared between several products.
Create them before the products that use them. If you do it the other way round, you will have to reopen each product to add them.
Create semi-finished products as By kilograms recipes: they are produced and used by weight. We explain it in Create a recipe.

Use one recipe inside another

Create the semi-finished product

For example, Biscuit base: By kilograms, with its ingredients (biscuits, butter, sugar), its handling time and its actual weight.

Add it inside the product

In the Cheesecake, click Edit ingredients or Add Ingredients. In the “Search ingredients or recipes” box type “base” and pick the recipe. Enter how many grams the cheesecake uses.

Check what it has inherited

The line shows the cost of those grams and the nutrition and allergen badges. The cheesecake’s Allergens card already includes the gluten from the biscuits.

Recipes › Cheesecake

Cheesecake Milk · Gluten · Eggs

Ingredient	Quantity	Cost
Cream cheese	1,000 g	€6.90
Cream 35%	400 ml	€1.48
1Recipe - Biscuit base	320 g	€1.15

2Nested

Biscuit base · 320 g

The biscuit base goes into the cheesecake like any other ingredient.

1The mirror ingredient: it carries the recipe name with the prefix “Recipe - ” (or *RP* in older accounts). Its price per kilo is the cost of the recipe.
2Nested: below the ingredients, it links to each sub-recipe so you can open and edit it.

How a semi-finished product behaves

What	How it works
Cost	It contributes its full cost in proportion to what you use. Change the price of an ingredient in the cream and both the cream and every product that contains it are recalculated.
Allergens and traces	They carry over to the product. On the label and the technical sheet, the semi-finished product is broken down into its ingredients, sorted by weight.
Waste	Ingredient waste is not applied to a sub-recipe. What counts is its actual weight, which corrects its cost per kilo.
Recipes by units	You can also nest a recipe measured in units (for example, 12 truffles in a box). It is added in units.
Levels	Unlimited. The only thing not allowed is a loop.
Trash	If a sub-recipe is in the trash, the editor warns “Deleted recipe”. Remove the line and add the current recipe, or restore it from the trash.

View and filter nested recipes

In Recipes and formulas, the Nesting filter shows the recipes With nested recipes, and the Recipe use filter separates Intermediate (used in other recipes) from Finished (with a selling price).
In the ingredient list, the Hide recipes option hides the mirror ingredients so you only see raw materials.
A recipe’s Cost report breaks down the nested recipes with their share of ingredients, staff and overheads. See Recipe costing.

Produce semi-finished products

The semi-finished product is not made automatically when you produce the finished product. Create the production order for the base first: when you finish it, its lot goes into stock. Then, in the cheesecake’s production order, that lot is deducted like any other ingredient. If you chain several, use an itinerary. We explain it in Production orders.

Tip

Don’t mix up three things: a semi-finished product is another recipe that goes inside; a production format is the same product in another quantity (see Formats); and a by-product is what is left over when you make something, like the yolks from a meringue (see By-products).

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to create a “Biscuit base” ingredient by hand?

No. Search for the base recipe in the cheesecake editor, as if it were an ingredient. Recipok creates its mirror ingredient by itself, with the cost and allergens of the recipe.

How many levels of nesting are allowed?

As many as you need: a cream inside a filling, inside a cake, inside an assortment. The only thing Recipok prevents is a loop (A inside B and B inside A).

I have changed the price of butter. Do I have to touch the cakes?

No. The cost of the cream is recalculated and, with it, the cost of every recipe that uses it, at any level.

Is the semi-finished product produced automatically when I produce the cake?

No. First you create the production order for the base; when you finish it, its lot goes into stock. That lot is then deducted in the cheesecake’s production order. With several semi-finished products in a chain, an itinerary generates all the production orders at once.

In the ingredient list I see “Recipe - Biscuit base” or “*RP* Biscuit base”. What is it?

It is the recipe’s mirror ingredient. Older accounts show it with the *RP* prefix. Don’t delete it or change its price: Recipok maintains it from the recipe.