Create dishes

This guide shows how to create a dish: give it a name and a category and assign one or more recipe building blocks. Allergens, nutrition and labels are produced automatically from the building blocks — you do not enter them by hand.

Dishes are maintained by kitchen users (roles Kitchen Admin, Kitchen Team or Kitchen Management). Open dishes via Kitchen → Dishes.

Recipe or dish? The difference

CateringOS deliberately separates two things:

Recipe

the building block. A preparation with ingredients, from which allergens and nutrition are calculated — e.g. "mashed potatoes", "roast beef", "apple sauce". You maintain recipes under Kitchen → Recipes.

Dish

what lands on the plate and gets planned into the menu. A dish consists of one or more recipe building blocks — e.g. "roast beef with mashed potatoes" from the two recipes "roast beef" and "mashed potatoes".

The benefit: a building block such as "mashed potatoes" is maintained once and reused across many dishes. Change the recipe and the nutrition updates in every dish that uses it.

Overview

A dish consists of:

  • a name and a category (starter, main course, side, dessert, breakfast, snack),

  • a list of building blocks — at least one recipe, ideally several.

Allergens, nutrition (kcal per portion) and labels (e.g. vegetarian) are aggregated from the building blocks and shown after saving — not maintained by hand.

Open dishes and start a new dish

How: Open Kitchen → Dishes and click "+ New dish" in the top right.

Result: The "New dish" form appears with the fields Name and Category and a Building blocks section.

Enter name and category

How: Give the dish a descriptive name (e.g. "roast beef with mashed potatoes") and pick the matching category.

Result: The name later appears in the dish list and the menu; the category determines under which course the dish is grouped.

Assign recipe building blocks

How: In the Building blocks section, click the search field and pick a recipe (typing filters the list). For further blocks click "+ Add row" and pick the next recipe. Remove a row with the ✕ next to it.

Result: Each row is a building block of the dish. At least one block is required — only then can the dish be saved.

If a block does not exist as a recipe yet, create it right here with "+ create new recipe" (name, category, base portions and a first ingredient). This is a quick recipe for the block; the full recipe (several ingredients, preparation, labels) stays under Kitchen → Recipes.

Save and check the calculation

How: Click "Save".

Result: The Calculation block appears and shows the values aggregated from the building blocks:

  • kcal per portion,

  • the labels (e.g. vegetarian), if all blocks carry them,

  • the "Last calculated on …" date.

If a block has incomplete nutrition, the "Incomplete" hint appears — then maintain the missing values on the relevant recipe or under Settings → Ingredients.

The dish in the list

After saving, the dish appears in the list ("Own" tab) with its category, the building blocks, the aggregated allergens (or the "low-allergen" hint) and kcal/p.. Use the star to mark frequently used dishes as a favourite ("Favourites" tab). Use Edit to adjust a dish and Archive to remove it from the selection.

What’s next?