Okay, now that you have your recipe converted to weights, you now want to get the percentage ratios of the formula. This is the key to scaling up your formula.
When you eavesdrop in conversations with us R&D chefs, you’ll hear us question each other during brainstorm sessions with “what was your percentage of salt” or “what’s your sugar to salt ratio?” That’s gathering important information for problem solving, and it takes away the requirement of needing to know the volume of the recipe prepared and gets us to the potential causes of issues.
Okay, so this is how you convert to ratios using Excel. I primarily use that spreadsheet format, because the documents can often be transferred between teams without having to deal with converting formats. What I’m about to describe may be really difficult without an accompanying how-to video, but I’ll do my best. I’ll put together a video soon.
1) Open the spreadsheet that has your formula
2) Add a column to the right of the weight measurements. We’ll call it the Percentage column.
3) Add a totals row below the final ingredient name. Call that the Sum row.
4) Select the field (box) in the sum row directly below the final weight measurement and sum the values of the components. Microsoft offers tutorials on how to do that.
5) Select the first field in the Percentage column. You will be putting in a formula that will allow you to take the weight of each component and divide it by the sum of all the weights. Essentially, you write an equation in the new column taking information from the weights column and dividing it by the sum.
You’ll type this:
=(D2/D10)
assuming that D is your weights column, and D10 is your sum row. D2 is the first box in your weights column.
Press return, and a decimal number should appear.
For the next box down, you’ll have to type in
=(D3/D10)
and so forth until you get to your sum.
There is a faster way, and I’ll discuss that in the tutorial.
Give it a try and let me know what you think!
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