SC - Scaling up recipes?

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

howdy all from Anne-Marie:

Ras says you can just bulk up recipes.

I would respectfully disagree. Here's a couple examples:

1. You need 1T of fat to sautee a couple of chicken breasts. If you
multiply that to 100 chicken pieces, do you then need 100 T? Not in my
experience anyway (and in fact, we've had inexperienced cooks just melt
that 100 T and then throw in the chicken parts which then end up boiling in
the fat. ugh!)

2. You need 2 cups of broth to cover, say, 2 lbs of meat. If you multiply
that to 50 pounds of meat, 50 cups of broth will be way too much, and your
stew will be too dilute.

3. spices potentcy varies greatly from lot to lot. If you just multiply it
up, it is very easy to over do it. you can always add more...it is more
difficult to fix it after you have added too much! Also, some spices do a
wierd chemistry thing in large amounts, like cinnamon. I've had dishes
where the amount of spice has actually imparted an unpleasant texture and
grainyness (they probably used very stale spices and had to add so much to
get any flavor at all it was ooky)

4. things like onions, apples and leeks tend not to multiply up properly in
my experience. Much of this is probably because the recipes says "one
onion". How big? With leeks, how much of the green part? How big of pieces
the apples get chopped into will vary the volume quite a bit. Stuff like that.

again, this is my experience. Remember I usually have a kitchen full of
enthusiastic and not particularily skilled help, with a handful of
experienced cooks to hopefully catch any potential disasters before they
happen. What seems like second nature so you dont even have to think about
it is not second nature to everyone! :)

- --AM


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