Put your brine recipes on easy-to-adjust spreadsheets

[pmmpete]

When you want to smoke a batch of fish, the first thing you need to do is produce an appropriate amount of brine.  For example, if the recipe you want to use produces a gallon of brine, but you only need three cups of brine, you have to calculate the correct percentage (18.75 percent) of each ingredient.  You may also need to convert various units of measurement, such as gallons to cups, cups to ounces, ounces to grams, or tablespoons to teaspoons.  It's a hassle, and it's easy to make mistakes.

However, you can quickly adjust your brine recipes to produce whatever quantity of brine you want for a particular batch of fish by using an Excel spreadsheet.  Here's how it works, using Kummok's "Bradley Smoked Wild Alaskan Salmon" brine recipe which is posted at the beginning of this "fish" forum as an example.  In the spreadsheet shown below, Columns B and D contain the original quantities of liquid and dry ingredients from Kummok's recipe.  The recipe specifies 1 gallon (16 cups) of water, and 1 quart (4 cups) of soy or teriyaki sauce, for a total liquid volume of 20 cups.  If you want to produce 3 cups of this brine, you enter that number in Cell H3, which is highlighted in yellow, and/or .75 quarts in Cell F3.  The spreadsheet automatically calculates the percentages (15% in the example shown below) and inserts it in Cell H4.  Then the spreadsheet multiplies each liquid and dry ingredient in Kummok's recipe by .15 and inserts those numbers in Columns F and H, as shown below: 



To calculate the quantities of each ingredient required to produce 5 cups of Kummok's brine, all you need to do is enter "5" in Cell H4 and/or 1.25 in Cell F3 and hit tab, and the spreadsheet will calculate the quantities of each ingredient, as shown below:



You can download my spreadsheet for Kummok's brine recipe, and a form of spreadsheet for use with any brine recipe, from Google Documents at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0sHlrkMep0MY3dWeGlIQXBBUm8/edit?usp=sharing.  After you sign up, click on File, click on Download, specify save, and put the spreadsheet wherever you keep your recipes on your computer.  Then enable editing, and you're ready to go.  If you have trouble downloading the spreadsheet, send me a personal message, and I'll email it to you.

Here's what the form of spreadsheet looks like:



For an example of how to use the form of spreadsheet, here is the original recipe for Kummok's brine:

1 gallon water
1 quart teriyaki sauce
1 cup pickling salt
2 lbs brown sugar
2 tbsp garlic powder
3 tbsp cayenne pepper

First, enter the quantities of liquid and solid ingredients from this recipe in Column B, as shown below.  You may want to convert some of the units of measurement.  For example, in Cell B7 I converted one gallon of water to 4 quarts, because all the liquids need to use the same unit of measurement so the spreadsheet can add them to get a total liquid volume.  In the solid ingredients, the numbers are just numbers which you can describe however you prefer.  You can mix weights and volumes, english and metric, and various units of measurement.  Regardless of what the numbers are, they will be adjusted by the percentage in Cell F4 and/or H4.



Then if you want, you can convert some of those quantities to more convenient units of measurement in Column D, as shown below.  For example, because I prefer to measure salt by weight rather than by volume, I converted one cup of salt to 10 ounces of salt.  You could also convert from English units to metric units if you prefer.  Then duplicate the description of the units of measurement in Column C in Column G, and the description of the units of measurement in Column E in Column I.



To clean up the unused rows in the spreadsheet, you can delete the unused rows for dry ingredients (Rows 18-22), but don't delete the unused rows for liquid ingredients (Rows 9 and 10), because you'll screw up the formulas in the spreadsheet.  However, you can delete the descriptions of ingredients and units in rows 9 and 10.



Then all you need to do is insert the total volume of brine you want in Cell H3, which is highlighted in yellow, and/or Cell F3, and hit Tab, and the spreadsheet will calculate the quantities of liquid and dry ingredients required to produce that amount of brine:



I got the idea for preparing these spreadsheets from Pikeman_95 (Kirby), who got the idea from MTfiddler (Lon Okler).  They have been using spreadsheets which are set up differently for sausage recipes.  I only know the basics of how to prepare spreadsheets, so if you have ideas for improving this brine spreadsheet, I'd love to hear them.

[Mr Walleye]

Nice job pmmpete!  8)

This will come in very handy for lots of people.

Thanks for sharing!

Mike

[devo]

If your sharing the file why is it asking me to get permission to down load it? Should it not be set up so we can just down load it?

[pmmpete]

Pikeman_95 (Kirby) put some sausage recipes on google documents, and I was able to download them with no problem, so I tried to do the same thing with my spreadsheet.  But this is the first time I've used the google documents thing, and I inadvertently left the document set at "private."  Sorry about that.  I've changed that to "anybody with the link may view."  I hope that means that anybody can save the document to their computer.  Let me know if you still aren't able to get the spreadsheet onto your computer. 

[devo]

Yes working now
Thanks

[mikecorn.1]

Man, this is great! Thanks.
Maybe this should be a sticky topic

[pmmpete]

There are a lot of people who make excel spreadsheets all day at work, and have done that for years.  I am not one of those people.  This is one of the first spreadsheets I've made.  I'm hoping that some spreadsheet wizards will get interested in this subject and come up with much better ways to put recipes onto spreadsheets than the beginner spreadsheet I have produced. 

[Keymaster]

Very nice job Pete, thanks for sharing!!

[pikeman_95]

Pete
I knew you could figure it out. I checked it out and it works fine. I have filed it away on my machine. This is going to come in handy. I don't think it needs to be anymore then you have done. If some one does not know how much brine they need. All they have to do is put their fish in the container that they intend to use then put enough water to cover the fish like they would with the brine. Take the fish out and measure the amount of water they have in their container. That will be the amount of brine they will need. I have been using gallon zip lock bags lately and they seem to work well for doing my fish. They are easy to flop around to get the brine all over the fish.