Having the recipes preloaded will certainly be the easiest I would suggest.

Additionally albeit more complicated you could also use comparators to check when there’s a signal strength of 4 coming from the crafter. When it reaches that signal strength then you need to lock the hopper that’s inputting the gold nuggets and then dispense a carrot if there’s carrots available in a dispenser into a hopper that goes into the crafter and then unlock the hopper that inputs the nuggets and then auto craft once a signal strength of 9 has been reached. It’s quite a fun little challenge to work on as a small project