Bread baking journal in Airtable - Linked to another record with quantities

[Thomas_Holth]

Just for fun I thought about using Airtable as a journal for my bread baking, so that I’ll maybe improve and learn something over time. It’s easy to set up a basic table where I have ingredients as a long text, flour, water and yeast content as number, a rating column and so on…

But, to make it more interesting I thought I could link the bread table with an ingredients table, where I store data for each ingredient, so that I could get nutritional data for each bread I make, according to how much of each ingredient I use. Also I could pull out information on how much I use in total of the different ingredients.

The problem is that I cannot find a way to do this so that I, in the bread table, assign a quantity to each linked ingredient in the ingredients table. Is this even possible in Airtable?

Do anybody have any ideas on this? Help would be appreciated.

[Oli_Steadman]

Hi Thomas have you explored the “Count” and “Rollup” field types? Pretty powerful - I am linking around 30 tables in one of my bases which all calculate using each other’s numbers.

Happy to help if you can give an example?

[Thomas_Holth]

Alright, thanks. I’ll post something after I tried that.

[Valentin_GUENIC]

I’m curious to know how you resolved this…

[Thomas_Holth]

Hi @Valentin_GUENICHON

I solved it by using 3 tables in the bread base: a bread table, an ingredients table and a raw material table.

The bread table is linked to the ingredients table, and the ingredients table is linked to the raw materials table. I used lookup and rollup to fetch information between the tables.

The raw material contains all the different flours and seeds I use, together which information about weight, volume to weight ratio (since I use cups when I measure the quantity of flour), brand, energy/100g and price per kilo.

The ingredients table contains all the ingredients used in each spesific bread. An ingredient is a raw material in a certain quantity, i.e. 3 cups of white wheat flour. I also pull into that table some information from the raw materials table to be able to calculate weight and price of each ingredient. I group the table based on which bread each ingredient belongs to. easy see a recipe.

The bread table is a list of all the breads I make. Most of the information in that table is gathered from the ingredients table (total price, weight, energy), but it also contains information such as cooking time and cooking temperature, a comment and a rating, and a photo.

In the end I didn’t really use the base so much, but maybe I will if I start to experiment more with different breads…

Here are screenshots of the tables (They are all in norwegian…):

Bread table:

Ingredients table:

Raw materials table:

Tell me if you would like to know more about the rollup functions and formulas…

-Thomas