Paste a recipe instead of typing it in

Paste a recipe as plain text, one ingredient per line, the way a recipe already reads, and Dishboard reads the quantity, unit, and name from each line automatically. Cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons convert to a real gram weight where the ingredient is known, instead of guessing a density, and a price is never invented for anything it creates.

Why retyping a recipe is where costing usually stalls

Recipe costing has always needed the same information a recipe card already has: what goes in, how much, and what unit. The friction was never the math, it was moving that information into a form built for numbers, one field at a time, for every ingredient in every dish. A ten-ingredient recipe meant ten rounds of naming an ingredient, picking a unit and typing a quantity before a single dollar figure appeared. Most people who never cost a dish do not stop because the arithmetic is hard. They stop before it starts.

What gets read from a pasted line

• Fractions and mixed numbers: "1/2 cup", "1 1/2 tsp", and the unicode fraction characters some recipe sites use ("½ cup").
• A range: "2 to 3 cloves garlic" is read at its low end, and the line is flagged to check, since the range itself is real information worth a second look, not a number to silently average.
• A wide unit vocabulary: teaspoon and tablespoon in their common abbreviations, cup including a bare "c", plus metric weights and volumes. A genuinely ambiguous shorthand, a lone "t" or "T" that could mean teaspoon or tablespoon depending on case, is refused rather than guessed, and asks instead.
• Container and package words: a can, a box, a bag, a stick, a bunch, a head, with the weight multiplied correctly when a parenthetical states what one container holds, as in "2 (400 g) cans tomatoes".
• A title line at the top of the paste, recognized and left out of the ingredient list rather than costed as a mystery item named after the dish, as long as the title runs to two or more words ("Chocolate Chip Cookies", not "Cookies") and a later line states a real quantity.
• A line with no real amount, like "salt, to taste" or "parsley, for garnish", correctly read as not costed rather than assumed to be one piece of something.

Worked example

Pasting this text:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 to 3 large eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• Sea salt, for garnish

reads back as: all-purpose flour at 250 g (2 cups, weighed as a USDA measure), butter at 113.5 g (0.5 cup, weighed as a USDA measure), brown sugar at 165 g (0.75 cup, weighed as an estimate), vanilla extract at 4.2 g (1 tsp, weighed as a USDA measure), the eggs flagged to check since "2 to 3" is a range, and the sea salt left out with no amount given. Five real gram weights and one flagged decision from six lines of ordinary recipe text, no unit conversion done by hand.

Where the weights come from

A cup or spoon measure is converted through a USDA-derived ingredient catalog that stores a measured gram weight per ingredient and per exact unit, never a single assumed density applied to everything. Two ingredients with the same cup measure can weigh very differently (a cup of flour and a cup of chocolate chips are not close), so the catalog looks each one up rather than converting by a formula. Where a record exists it is marked a USDA measure; where the catalog holds a reasonable estimate instead of a lab figure, the line says so. Weight is never guessed from volume by inventing a density: an ingredient the catalog does not know keeps its original unit and asks to be described as a weight instead.

Two places to try it

Signed in, the same reader sits behind the "Paste a recipe" button on a menu item, and creates or matches ingredients directly in your workspace as it goes. With no account at all, the free recipe cost calculator reads a pasted recipe the same way and fills in a name, quantity, and unit for each line, leaving the price for you to enter, since a price is never invented in either place.

What it will not do

It will not invent a price. Every new ingredient a paste creates starts at zero, whether that happens inside a workspace or in the free calculator, and is priced by a person, not a guess. It will not convert a weight into a volume, or the reverse, without a real measured figure behind it, because that conversion needs a density this product does not invent. And it will not silently pick between two real meanings of an abbreviation: a bare "t" or "T" is refused rather than resolved as a coin flip between teaspoon and tablespoon.