SC - Carne con chile

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Paul Shore wrote:
> 
> Actually I had heard that this phenomenon had been studied at MIT and there was even a set of scaling tables devised by them.

Sorry, I hadn't heard that. Does your source for this info provide
details? Lay 'em on me. Thanks in advance, etc.
 
> When we cook in large quantities, all other things are not equal. Different masses of food heat at different rates given the same BTU input.

...Except that under large-quantity circumstances the BTU input is
rarely the same as when we cook at home, so while you may be right about
the premise of equality, the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. The
proportion of BTU input to mass, or pot bottom surface area, may be
close to the same, however.

> Extraction of essential oils occurs at different rates. Oxidation and browning reactions (can you say scorching?) proceed differently. Different relative surface areas are involved. Liquids and especially alcohols and other volitiles evaporate at different rates.

OK, I'll buy that. These all apply equally in small-scale cookery from
kitchen-to-kitchen variations, of course, without any perceived change
in spice requirements, however, which is why two people can follow the
same recipe and get different products.  Does this information help us
explain or quantify the phenomenon being claimed of spice use? If so,
how? We seem to be back to the original question in this discussion.  
 
> This in nowhere more obvious than in baking. For baking you can not simply scale up a home recipe for industrial use. It doesn't work.

My experience as a pastry chef, if not exactly an industrial baker,
suggests otherwise. We're not talking about industrial use. Unless, of
course, you're baking the world's largest banana bread for the Guinness
Book of World Records or some such, in which case I agree. Very few
SCA-type catering situations really seem to be on a scale where the
proportions would be too different. If I were running a factory or
something, I might think otherwise, but considering that when we bake we
are making many pies in standard pie tins in a relatively ordinary-sized
oven, or several of them, usually over several baking periods, the
physics involved aren't all that different. While I agree that the
conditions under which industrial professionals operate are different
enough to warrant different recipes, I really feel that what we do in
general for SCA-type situations is more like a home-cooking situation
than an industrial one. 

Adamantius
- -- 
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com
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