Recipe books & recipes

Recipe Books & Recipes

Recipe books let you organise, cost, and share the recipes that power your menus. They're designed for any catering business that needs a central, structured home for culinary content — from food trucks to large-scale event caterers.

Creating a Recipe Book

Navigate to Recipe Books from the main menu. Click New recipe book to create your first book. Each book acts as a container — think of it like a folder — that holds all the individual recipes for a particular menu range, event type, or cuisine style.

Adding Recipes to a Book

Open a book by clicking its card, then add a new recipe from inside the book detail view. For each recipe you can:

• Set a recipe name and description
• Add allergen information using the Edit allergens picker
• Organise content into sections (ingredients, method, notes)

Setting Allergens

Inside any recipe, click Edit allergens to open the allergen picker. Toggle the relevant labels — including common allergens and dietary markers such as Vegan, Vegetarian, Halal, Gluten Free, and Dairy Free. Selected allergens appear as colour-coded chips on the recipe, making it easy to communicate dietary information at a glance. Click Done to close the picker.

Importing a Recipe with AI

If you have an existing recipe from a website, document, or cookbook, use the AI Recipe Import feature to save time:

1. Open the recipe you want to populate.
2. Click the AI import option to open the AI Recipe Import modal.
3. Paste your recipe text (up to 20,000 characters) into the Recipe text field.
4. Click Import recipe — Claude will parse the text and add structured sections automatically.

> Existing recipe content is never overwritten; imported sections are added alongside what's already there.

How Recipes Support Menu Costing

Recipes built in CaterCloud feed directly into menu costing, so keeping ingredient sections accurate ensures your quotes and invoices reflect real food costs.

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Tip: Once your recipes are built out, link them to menu items to keep your costing calculations automatically up to date.