How to use a free food cost calculator for a pizza dough recipe.

Here is a pizza dough recipe I use at home, but it can be multiplied for a restaurant kitchen. I will then use a free food cost calculator to cost out the recipe.

2 1/4 teaspoons (1 packet) active dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 1/2 cups warm water (110°F/45°C)
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (you can also use bread flour for a chewier crust)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

This recipe makes two 10-inch (individual-sized) pizza dough balls. Let’s turn it into a recipe for a small restaurant that wants to run a lunch special. They will need 24 dough balls. The conversion then looks like this:

24 grams of active dry yeast
12 grams sugar
1800 milliliters warm water (110°F/45°C)
1050 grams of all-purpose flour (you can also use bread flour for a chewier crust)
80 milliliters olive oil
22.5 grams salt

pizza dough portions — Dough for pizza cooking. Three balls of fresh dough taken from full batch.

Converting the recipe isn’t that difficult, but if you need help, you should probably check out ChatGPT for simple recipe conversions. It’s really a handy tool. The full instructions for this recipe are below, but first, let’s cost it out to understand your food costs in your restaurant or food service operation.

Here are the current purchase costs from Costco Business Centre:
active dry yeast – $8.99 for 908g
white granulated sugar – $37.99 for 20kg
water – $.25 (arbitrary flat rate for all recipes)
all-purpose flour – $24.99 for 20kg
olive oil – $41.79 for 3Litres
table salt – $4.69 for 3x1kg

kitchen management inventory costs for salt

You could calculate this all manually, like using a simple calculator. However, if I am going to have to do this over and over again for my complete menu, it will save hours and hours of time by using Google Sheets to create your own free food cost calculator.

Google Sheets is available to anyone who has a Google (Gmail) account, and it’s free to use. Although Google Sheets doesn’t have the same capabilities as Microsoft Excel it is certainly capable of handling hundreds of recipes that have been costed based on your own price list and past purchases. The images below will give you an idea as to how this can work.