An Ingredient is a raw item you purchase (e.g. chicken breast, rice, olive oil). It has its own cost, base weight/unit, nutrition, allergens and supplier. A Sub-Recipe is something you prepare from ingredients (a marinade, a cooked grain, a sauce) and reuse across meal recipes. A sub-recipe has a list of ingredients with quantities, and Sprwt automatically rolls up the cost, nutrition, allergens and dislikes of those ingredients into the sub-recipe. Both live in the same database and can be converted into each other at any time (a Convert to Sub-Recipe / Convert to Ingredient action); the only difference behind the scenes is an internal marker that identifies the item as a sub-recipe. Sub-recipes also get extra fields ingredients do not have: Sub-Recipe Group, Priority Order, Cost per hour, Time to prepare (Hours), the Override Food COGS toggle and the Auto Macros? toggle (the last one only when the Macros module is on).