SC - sharing Jumbles

[Helen]

LYN M PARKINSON wrote:
> 
> Hey, guys, we're doing apples and oranges here!  Scaling up a recipe
> provides x quantity for x persons.  Spice scale up is not providing
> quantity, but intensity of flavoring.  Ain't the same animal.

The intensity of flavor you describe comes from essential oils found in
the spice. It doesn't multiply like bacteria, nor make anything it
touches radioactive. Either it's there, molecule by molecule, or it
isn't, and the variables that would apply would have to do with the
shape and capacity of the mouth and tongue, which vary from individual
to individual, but not from case to case. Assuming the spice is stirred
evenly into the mass, it is comparing apples and, well, apples.

By the above logic, if  a chili recipe calling for one chili pequin (for
example) is scaled up by  a factor of twenty, it would call for (again,
just an example) five chilies instead of twenty. That simply isn't the
case, for the reason detailed previously. If it were, and you made
twenty individual pots of chili, all just fine in heat intensity, and
then put them together in a giant bowl or pot, it would magically become
too hot. It doesn't. Now, when you start with a measurement of 2 and 1/4
teaspoons, and multiply first to tablespoons, and then to ounces or
cups, the math can get maddeningly complex as you weave back and forth
between wet and dry measures, or mass and volume. You've already said
this is the most difficult part for you, so why does a mathematical
error, especially when others have said there seems to be no
consistently observable phenomenon at work, seem so impossible?

Or, look at it another way...let's assume you make a dish that you feel
is too spicy. What do you do as one possible solution, but dilute it
with more of the other ingredients? You do that to make the total mass
less spicy. If there were some magical question of flavor intensity at
work, it would be impossible, and diluting a too-spicy pot of whatever
would only produce a larger pot of a too-spicy dish. Again, it doesn't.

We can't very well discuss Helen's problem with scaling-up recipes and
discuss flavor intensity and say scaling up the spices is not the issue,
can we? Will these dishes also taste too much like meat if we scale up
the meat quantities appropriately? How about onion? Carrot? All of these
ingredients have a given, finite amount of the stuff that gives them
their flavor; spices just have more per unit, which is why they're used
to flavor other foods. That doesn't make them immune to the laws of physics.
    
Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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