Deciding Recipe Scale HELP

I have two questions regarding writing recipes...

1. How do you decide in a recipe what will be 100% in the scaling of it?

2. ChefSteps peeps, would you show us how you set up the math for your recipes so that when you change one ingredient it changes all of them? Is there an excel sheet by chance? I'd love to design my recipes with that ability!

Thanks in advance.

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meyer8863

Hey Kyle, great questions.

To answer you first question, you look at the total yield (add up all the ingredients) and make a judgement call on what is enough.

I find the easiest way to scale a recipe, is to think about it in percentages. Lets say you're baking and the recipe calls for 200g of flour, but you only have 150g of flour in the kitchen. What you would do, is divide what I have (150g), by the recipe(200g). So, 150/200 =0.75. This means that my recipe will be 75% of the original. I then look at the amount of each of the other ingredients, and multiply them by 0.75.

You can also use this to increase the recipe. If i wanted to triple a recipe for instance, I would triple the ingredients. If you wanted to increase the recipe by 2.5 times, you would multiply each ingredient by 2.5

The only thing I would note is when you scale a recipe greatly, cooking times and temperatures change. Check out the cornbread recipe for example... CS adjusts the time and temperature based on the cooking vessel size.

TL;DR VERSION

(Amount of Ingredient you want to use) / (Amount of ingredient in Recipe) = Multiplier

Multiply "Multiplier" by all other ingredients in the recipe, to get amount needed.

fisher23

Please explain #1. For baking 100% is quantity of flour, hydration is the % of water, i.e.. 1000 grams flour (100%), 80% hydration would be 800 grams water. Is that what you are talking about?

hasdayweb

For baking I get that it goes off of the flour as 100%. My question is more for other recipes. Like the one I attached. I like how Modernist writes their recipes and I just want to know if there is a method to choosing the ingredient that everything is based on.

Does that explain the question better? Thanks for weighing in.

hasdayweb

So you're saying just pick an ingredient that seems to be the most important and make that the 100%? I attached an example from Modernist to be a bit more clear about my first question.

That's a great equation for scaling. Thanks!

fisher23

I think we are still talking the along the same line. Flour is the main ingredient in bread so it is figured as the 100%. In fried chicken the main or ingredient with the most weight is the chicken and that is why everything is figured from that at 100%. Because it is figured in percentages you can easily scale the recipe to make a larger or smaller quality with the same results.

meyer8863

Yep, exactly. In the recipe you posted, the main ingredient is chicken. They have actually posted the "scaling" for you, where the weight of the chicken is 100%.

Let's say instead of 800g of chicken, you had 1000g. Using the equation I gave you before, the multiplier would be 1.25. (1000g/800g=1.25)

You would then multiply the quantity of all other ingredients by 1.25.

Instead of 200g of flour like in the recipe, you would use 250g (200*1.25=250)... For example.

fisher23

By the way if you haven't tried it you can put your own recipes in ChefSteps format and they will scale just like theirs. It's in your profile. There is a small learning curve to evtering a recipe but I think it is worth it. I've only put in a couple but those are the ones I get asked for a lot and I just have to email the link. Here is one of mine

hasdayweb

I didn't realize that you could do that! That's great.

hasdayweb

Got it! Thanks!

JasonWirth_68226

I thought the Modernist Cuisine recipes were a nice presentation when I first saw them but the scaling part irks me. For example, they base everything off the weight of the chicken but a better approach is to separate the components and use ratios.

Are people really going to measure out 0.1g of Bay leaf per 800g of chicken? Also, 800g of chicken is 1.76 lbs. Who buys chicken in that amount, it's such a strange place to start. 450g is 1 lbs. So maybe base everything off 450g, or 900g, or even 1000g (1kg) if you want to leverage metric units to make mental math easier.

The spice mix should be its own set of percentages. It's quite common to make rubs in bulk in advance so present ratios of the different spices, then the user can scale them when making the recipe. If I'm using 200g black peppercorns as the base then I know how much of everything else to make.

For breadings there should be a flour : spice rub ratio. Eyeballing the recipe there's about 30g of spices to 400g flour, which is about 8%, or a 100g flour : 8 g spices. This could be simplified and made 10:1 if you are fine with a 2% margin of error.

The recipe separates salt from spices (not a bad idea, maybe the chicken is brined so you want to use less salt), so you could give a salt/spice ratio:

1 spice : 1 salt : .5 msg

BTW, this recipe uses almost 50% of the mass of chicken in flour / spice mix.