SC - labelling breads and such

[Alderton, Philippa]

david friedman wrote:
> 
> At 1:46 AM -0500 4/10/99, Helen wrote:
> >I have heard that if a recipe
> >calls for a 1 tsp. of spice, say pepper for example, for a 1 pound roast,
> >that if you did a 5 lb roast you would not use 5 tsp. of pepper.  So, pure math
> >out not solve my up scaling the recipes for that size crowd.  Is that a true statment?
> 
> I don't know. I have heard it too, but have never figured out any good
> argument for why it would be true. In any case, there is a considerable
> range, for most recipes, in how much spice you can use and have it come out
> tasty.

Exactly. I'm sometimes amazed at the number of quite experienced cooks
that have made this claim, and also have never heard any really
convincing argument for why it would be true. The closest I can get is
to figure that people are miscalculating weight of spices based on
volume measures (a pint is ~ a pound _of water_, not pepper, the world
round), which would, I think, tend to have people ending up with half as
much spice as they need, not twice as much.

Fineness of the grind, freshness and personal taste are all variables
from instance to instance, and if one were to think in terms of a single
molecule of a dish, as if it were a chemical compound (we all know this
is impossible, but let's move on for argument's sake), we'd probably be
doing our calculations based on percentage points or parts per million,
or some such. I have quite a few recipes, actually, that are based on
percentages (every good stock recipe I've ever seen, for example), with
no quantities mentioned at all except those the cook plugs in. I've
never known the laws of physics to be repealed in the case of spices.

 
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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