Scaling recipes

[patrickamory]

I haven't had much luck scaling Neelam Batra's large recipes down for 1 or 2 people - see a post I made in the Dinner thread. Both Prawncrackers and especially djyee100 pointed out that recipes don't always scale well up or down.

And in particular, that spices, salts, any fat or oils, and sour ingredients don't scale well.

This actually correlates with my experience. I'm used to scaling, because it's just me and my partner here, and he's often away, so I'm often cooking for 1 or 2. In practice I often cook for 3 or 4 and have leftovers. In any event, I'm always scaling recipes from various sources - Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, David Thompson (his recipes are actually usually for such small quantities that they often suit us right out of the book), Julie Sahni, the New York Times or wherever. And I've gotten quite used to keeping spice quantities more or less the same, or, say, taking them down by a third when the recipe is for a half... and of course, tasting and using my sense of smell constantly.

But Batra's recipes have been tough. Part of it, as Prawncrackers points out, is her attempt to make life easier on her readers by making vast quantities of pastes, masalas and so on in advance, so the scaling is more extreme. I'm not into having 1-1/2 cups of garlic and ginger paste in the fridge, or rasam powder in the cupboard, if I can avoid it - there's no way I'll use that much before it goes bad.

So anyway - not about Batra specifically, but in general, I was wondering whether anyone had rules of thumb on scaling for savory cooking beyond our five senses (and obviously I'm not talking about modernist cuisine). Here are mine:

- same amount of oil, or close to it

- same amount of spices, or 2/3 in proportion to 1/2 recipe, adjusted to taste

- salt: constantly adjusted for taste

It's interesting that djyee100 brought up sour flavors. I hadn't realized that they didn't scale well, which may be one reason why when I make dishes containing tamarind, they never seem sour enough. That, or I need to bite the bullet and make proper tamarind paste out of dried pods rather than using the Thai paste blocks

Any thoughts on scaling from anyone else?

[Shalmanese]

Have you made the dishes in their original quantities? It's more likely that the dish was originally unbalance than that scaling unbalanced it. The major thing I watch out for with scaling is if evaporation is an integral part of the process. If you want to scale those recipes up, you often have to do entire ingredient substitutions to get rid of excess water, like draining the tomatoes or using evaporated milk instead of fresh.

[nickrey]

I always treat recipes as a guide rather than a straight jacket. Likelihood is that the chef grabs a handful of this and a handful of that and then adjusts to taste anyway. This leads me to distrust any amounts given as they are probably only best guesstimates based on an intuitive reduction of quantities for the home chef.

To add to Shalmanese's point, a lot will depend on the size of the cooking vessel as well. It pays to think about the effect that the author is trying to achieve (are the spices toasted to give a more robust flavour, is the sugar caramelised, is it fried or stewed, etc) because all these factors are going to have an effect on the taste. Also bear in mind that commercial ranges put out an incredible amount of heat that you are unlikely to achieve on a home cooktop anyway: you may not easily be able to reproduce their flavours at home with the equipment you have.

If you can, experiment with preparing different amounts of the spices/ingredients involved, cook them to different levels of doneness, then combine and experiment. Eventually you will be able to mentally combine ingredients and their flavour profiles in your head. Admittedly, this is a highly analytical process but ironically it is the only way that you will get to be a truly intuitive cook.

And to qoute every David Thompson trained-chef I've ever talked to: taste and adjust; the balance should be sweet sour, salty, hot with none shouting out louder than the others. It's the goldilocks principle of cooking.

Edited January 9, 2012 by nickrey (log)

[patrickamory]

Couldn't agree more on David Thompson's method. It's particularly important for Thai food with its intensely loud flavors - they have to be perfectly in balance, and the final adjustment is crucial. As per his recommendation, I only add about half of the fish sauce and then adjust toward the end - as well as the other flavoring ingredients.

Thanks for the recommendations guys - I was hoping for some more specific comments, since I generally cook on these principles. I don't think the Batra book is basically flawed because reviewers, here and elsewhere, have had no problem with her recipes - but her strategy of making large quantities of certain key ingredients clearly doesn't scale.