Recipe yield

Recipe yield

Recipe yield is how much finished, saleable product a recipe produces, measured after losses and in the unit you sell in.

Input weight is not output weight

The sum of the ingredients is not the yield. Water leaves in the oven, and a sponge commonly loses somewhere in the region of 10% to 15% of its batter weight as bake loss, varying with tin size, batter depth, oven and bake length. Trim, scrapings left in the bowl and the tail of a piping bag are real losses on top of that.

If you cost from input weight but portion from output weight, the cost per portion is understated by the whole of the loss. Weigh a finished bake once against its batter weight and record the factor.

Record two numbers, not one

Total yield is the finished weight or volume. Portion yield is the number of saleable units. They move independently: the same batter baked in a different tin yields the same weight and a different number of slices.

Scale by weight rather than by doubling a recipe, and scale tins by area rather than by diameter. A 20 cm round holds roughly 1.6 times the batter of a 16 cm round at the same depth, not 1.25 times.

Yield sits directly under food cost percentage: a wrong yield makes every per-unit cost wrong by the same proportion.