Question
Peggy Byrd
What's the best way to cut a recipe and meet the requirements, as well as their recipes in general?
Answer
This is certainly a question that we get from time to time. And most of our recipes that you'll find in the courses are they yield a pretty typical amount of food that you would find with recipes in a cookbook or other websites. And that is they're going to feed four to six people generally speaking. Okay. So in order to adjust the recipe For recipes of that small quantity four to six. Okay, you can easily cut the recipe in half to begin with and you're going to come up with say two or three portions. If you wanted to bring it down even further to one portion. I you would you might need to do some testing in order to sort of fine-tune certain ingredients and those certain ingredients tend to be the spices and the seasonings okay to go back to that earlier question. So spices are pungent and Seasonings as I describe them meaning sources of saltiness and sourness tend to be pretty strong as well. And so very often we need to sort of take a more nuanced approach when it comes to those items of concentrated taste or flavor. Okay? But start off by Simply Having the recipe and then make further adjustments as you desire. Okay, everyone's you know, Palette preference is going to be different. And so you get to make some final adjustments to see how you might like it. All right now on the note of recipe adjustments. So if we're dealing with small recipes and overall small quantities or small yields, then this idea of cutting a recipe in half. Or doubling a recipe is pretty easily done and and pretty safely done in other words. So you can just kind of use the ingredient quantities as they are written and you're most likely going to come up with results that are the same as the original recipe. It's when we start to say expand a recipe by five times or 10 times because we've got, you know, just a large crowd to to serve or perhaps you want to turn this recipe into a menu item at your cafe or your restaurant and you need to really scale up in that case. We definitely need to do some recipe testing again, especially of those more pungent items those more sort of intensely concentrated ingredients and then make adjustments. So, you know the sort of the classic scenario is that if you're scaling up a recipe you can take all those Main in ingredients, you know, the mirror Paul and and whatever those main ingredients are and just Multiply it by 5 or 10 to get started but when it comes to spices for example. Take a more judicious approach and instead of multiplying it by five just multiply it by 2 and then taste and test and then make adjustments and then find that place that's going to be best in terms of overall balance. Okay, so that generally speaking right is the approach to take to recipe adjustments when it comes to quantities. All right, but Peggy, hopefully that'll get you there. Just cut those recipes in half and then see if you can even cut them in half further if that better suits your situation keeping an eye on those most concentrated ingredients such as spices. Thank you.
