Help > Units

This topic deals with units of measure and how they are used in Resort Chef.

Recipes, for both cultural and historical reasons use some weird and wonderful units. Take a look at any recipe book and you'll see what we mean. Examples like 'a pinch of salt', 'a quarter bunch of parsley', 'two celery stalks', 'season to taste', etc. are all easy enough to understand when standing in a kitchen, but when it comes to calculating recipe costs, they are there, just to make computer programmer's lives miserable.

When designing Resort Chef we decided to let you, the user, use any unit of measure virtually anywhere in the program. In order to achieve this degree of flexibility, we needed to implement a system whereby Resort Chef could cope with converting between any two units that you could throw at the program. Each unit in Resort Chef is assigned a type. A unit's type determines how Resort Chef handles converting between that unit and any other unit.

Each unit also has a style. These unit styles let Resort Chef change the units used in a recipe from say Metric to British units. Unit types and unit styles are discussed below.

Unit Types

As far as Resort Chef is concerned, there are three types of unit; Weight, Volume, and Culinary units.

Weight units are any standard weight unit of measure. When you create a new database, the program automatically creates the following weight units:- 'gram', 'kilogram', 'pound', 'grain', 'ounce', 'pound (Troy)', 'ounce (Troy)', and 'slug'.

Volume units are any standard volume unit of measure. When you create a new database the program automatically creates the following volume units:- 'litre', 'gallon (UK)', 'gallon (US)', 'millilitre', 'ounce, fluid(UK)', 'ounce, fluid(US)', 'pint', 'quart', 'tablespoon', and 'teaspoon'.

Culinary units are those units than don't fit into the weight and volume types. When you create a new database the program automatically creates the following culinary units:- 'unit', 'dozen', 'half dozen', 'piece', 'cover', 'portion', 'serve'. Any new units that you add to your databases automatically become culinary units.

Resort Chef can automatically convert between any two weight units (i.e. grams to pounds). The program can also automatically convert between any two volume units (i.e. litres to gallons).

What the program can't do automatically is:-

•Convert from a weight to a volume unit.

•Convert from a weight to a culinary unit.

•Convert from a volume to a culinary unit.

The way that Resort Chef copes with unit conversion is discussed in detail in the topic titled Unit Conversions.

Unit Styles

As mentioned above, units are assigned styles. There are three styles that Resort Chef applies to units; Metric, British, and American.

Unit styles only apply to weight and volume units. You nominate your preferred 'local' units in the File Preferences view in the File Menu.

The choices are Metric, British, or American. This lets Resort Chef know what style of unit you prefer to work with.

At a later point in the program, Resort Chef can change units actually used in recipes from the style in which they were entered to your preferred local style.

For instance, you might have some recipes that you entered into a Resort Chef database from a British cook book. These recipes probably used units like pounds, ounces, fluid ounces, etc. If you prefer to work in metric units, you can have Resort Chef change the British units used in the recipe to metric units, automatically adjusting the ingredient quantities from British to metric as well. You end up with the recipes that you want, with their ingredient quantities converted to units that you are familiar with.

There are a couple of ways to change units styles within a recipe or recipes. If you wish to change all your recipes to a particular style, use the Batch Unit Conversion... options from the Tools Menu.

To convert unit styles within a single recipe, display the recipe in the Recipe dialog, click the Ingredients tab and then click the button. You will be prompted to select the unit style to convert the recipe's ingredients to.

Editing Units

All unit creation and modification is done via the Unit Dialog. This dialog can be displayed by selecting the Units... option from the View menu, by clicking the button in the toolbar, or by clicking the button in the Ingredient and Recipe dialogs.