Sure. Lets take the Chicken Noodle Recipe as an example:
To make Chicken Noddle Soup, you need several ingredients in varying quantities (i.e. 8 oz egg noodles, 2 lb chicken breasts, etc.). Now, I could store this all in a Long Text field, but then I couldn’t make an automatic shopping list because Airtable wouldn’t be able to distinguish the quantity from the ingredient, and between each line of text.
So instead, I made a [Recipe Ingredients] table to work as a “junction table,” which means it pairs one record from one table ([Recipes]) with another record in another table ([Ingredients]) in order to store more information about the union of those two tables.
So, I know that to make the soup I need 2lbs of chicken and 8oz of noodles. This is recorded in the [Recipe Ingredients] table like this:
-
{Recipe} || {Quantity} || {Unit} || {Ingredient}
-
Chicken Noodle Soup || 2.000 || lb || chicken breast
-
Chicken Noodle Soup || 8.000 || oz || egg noodles
- etc.
Basically, every time an ingredient is used in a recipe, it gets its own record in the [Recipe Ingredients] table describing how much is needed. Therefore, each [Recipe Ingredient] record is only tied to one [Recipe] record and only one [Ingredient] record each.
Because my base is also a meal planner, I have another very simple table which asks for a date and a recipe so I can plan meals out ahead of time. Now that I have dates associated with recipes, I can use a formula to filter down to all the relevant [Recipe Ingredients] records which will be needed that week.
The [Ingredients] table, with the help of another formula, is then able to say: Egg noodles are needed this week, add up all the [Recipe Ingredient] records containing egg noodles if I selected that recipe for this week.
