SC - New? Book

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Bonne of Traquair wrote:
> 
> Mass quantities don't always behave
> mathmatically correctly in taste and you could overdo it.  But do
> purchase the mathmatically correct amount, because you might well need
> it all, and you'd hate to need it and have bought less.

Agreed, because if you've done the math right, you almost certainly will
need it all.
 
> For me, the hardest part in all this is going from the teaspoons and
> partial tablespoons called for in recipes for 8-12 to the ounces
> you'll need to make enough for 400.

Many, many people have this difficulty, which is almost certainly why so
many people feel that when multiplying the spices in a recipe to make
400 or however many servings you need, you can't always rely on the
recipe's proportions.

Take one eight-serving pot of stew. It might contain, as a rough
example, one teaspoon of salt and a half-teaspoon of pepper. Now, make
nine more pots the same, identical way. Dump them all togther in a
larger pot. The entire batch _has_ the _same_ proportions of spice to
other ingredients as the original pot had. You don't go in with a spoon
looking to remove some of the salt or pepper, suddenly, because it's a
larger batch, or a collection of several. That would be silly.

Now, take the original recipe, multiply all the ingredients by ten, and
make a big batch of the stuff that way. Now yes, it may take longer to
cook, and there may be other variables, but can anyone explain to me
_why_ the spice levels of the multiplied batch should be proportionately
different from the original eight-serving pot? Do spices have some kind
of critical mass or something?

The best single explanation is, I think, an error in measurement or in
multiplication. An exception might be something like the cooking oil
needed to coat the bottom of a pot: sometimes if you multiply it the
same as everything else, you end up with a layer of oil that is not only
wider in the larger pot, but deeper. But with spices, I'd really check
my math and measuring before making such a claim.
  
Adamantius, terrible in his wrath, eh? ;  )
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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