Costing it up and getting it right
One of the hurdles in The Roux Scholarship application is calculating the costs for the recipe, to be included at the end. This shows our judges that applicants have a good grasp of what it means to develop a dish for a restaurant.
The limit for each portion is £25, so a total of £100 for the four-person recipe, which is more than generous for a dish including chicken, chicken livers and leeks (especially when ingredients such as truffle, caviar and foie gras are not permitted). That said, our judges are often surprised by the sums that a chef will submit with their dish, and getting it wrong can make the difference on getting a place in the regional finals.
Kenneth Culhane, Roux Scholar 2010, who has supported several chefs to enter the competition says: “I always tell them to be precise with every ingredient, even the small ones; use current supplier prices as the fluctuation is real over the past years, it’s can be such a moveable feast with constant changes in prices of ingredients,” he says.
“Ensure you cost per gram, millilitre, or piece matches the quantity used in the recipe. Consider how much usable product remains after trimming, peeling, or cooking loss. For example, 1 kg raw chicken might yield only 850g when it’s cooked.”
Kenneth also says: “It’s important to maximise all the ingredients available to you, from a sustainable footing, and also to ensure you minimise costs. I always ask the chefs to make sure that we run through the costings together before they send the entry as they might have made a mistake, such as a decimal point in the wrong place, or they have just calculated the amount incorrectly. So it’s always best to have the head chef check it all for you.”
Meanwhile, judge Chef Lisa Goodwin-Allen helps her brigade understand the cost of products by displaying it in her kitchen. “At Northcote we put up boards in the kitchen, daily boards, and we break down what each piece of meat cost us, what each piece of fish cost us, what the vegetables cost us. I’m a big believer that everyone in the kitchen, from the youngest one to the most senior one, should know how much those cost,” she says. “It’s actually massively important to show respect for the ingredient in its quality, and its price. Sometimes when you put a recipe together, you’ll think ‘Oh my God how much does that sauce actually cost?’. It’s important, when you’re creating dishes, to always realise how much things cost, as it can ramp up quite quickly.”
Common mistakes that can happen in costing a Roux Scholarship recipe:
- Chefs use the cost of the whole product, rather than the fraction they are using. For example, don’t include the price of a whole bottle of olive oil, but price of the quantity you are using.
- Guessing what a product costs and get it wildly wrong.
- Quantities relate to what is needed for all covers in the restaurant, not the number of people the recipe serves, ie. Four.
- Ingredients are mentioned in the recipe but are missing from the costings.
- The price is unrealistic for the product.
Main photo by Ambitious Studio* | Rick Barrett on Unsplash
