Scaling down a recipe

frag420

Hi folks,

So there is this soup kitchen across from my office that do the most amazing soups. I recently asked for a few of their recipes and they obliged however the recipes are for making 55-60 lites of the soup. If I want to scale down to make enough for say 1-2 litres I am thinking its a bit more difficult that dividing the ingrediants up in proportion to the amount I want to make?? Am I correct in this assumption? How do I ajust cooking times etc?

Any and all help greatly appreciated,

Cheers

frAg

Dubl07

Seasoning (salt, pepper, herbs, spices) and pungent ingredients like fish sauce will need a slightly higher proportion in a small batch quantity than a large one. Core ingredients like vegetables, meat and stock can generally be divided down according to quantity.

You could either check online for similar recipes in the smaller quantity for timing or be nice to us and share one or two of your recipes to get advice.

duploelabs

There's a great mnemonic I was taught. "11:34 is the time for soup" which means one part onion sweated down, one part cubed potato, 3 parts of what you're making the soup from (I.e carrot or beetroot or whatever) and then 4 parts stock.
Built a whole business on it

frag420

Dubl07 wrote: »

Seasoning (salt, pepper, herbs, spices) and pungent ingredients like fish sauce will need a slightly higher proportion in a small batch quantity than a large one. Core ingredients like vegetables, meat and stock can generally be divided down according to quantity.

You could either check online for similar recipes in the smaller quantity for timing or be nice to us and share one or two of your recipes to get advice.

With regards the bit in bold above, why is that? I would have thought it would be the other way around. I will dig out recipe and add it shortly for you guys.

cheers

frag420

So here is the recipe I need to scale down to about 1-2 ltrs

Chicken diced kg 7.5
Frozen Onions kg 3
Garlic kg 0.100 0.2
Lemongrass kg 0.200 0.4
Chillies, crushed kg 0.025 0.05
Potato, Sweet kg 7.500
Coconut milk tin 3
Cumin Powder kg 0.075
Coriander powder kg 0.075
Turmeric kg 0.050
Vegetable Stock kg 0.550
Bay leaves kg 0.001
Frozen Carrots kg 5.000
Fish Sauce Squid litre 0.225
Pepper, coarsely ground kg 0.020
Basil bunch 2

Peel sweet potatoes and dice into small cubes. Set aside. Heat oil. and bay leaves, onions and garlic. Fry till onions are soft and slightly browned round the edges. Add lemon grass, crushed chillies, cumin powder, coriander powder, black pepper, turmeric, and stock. Fry till spices are fragrant adding water to stop spices from sticking to the bottom of pan. Add sweet potatoes and carrots with 10 litres of water. Bring this to the boil. Cook till sweet potatoes and carrots are soft. Add coconut milk and fish sauce. Bring to the boil and turn heat off. Give the soup a quick blitz to mix everything. Add chicken, basil and make soup up to 50 litres.

Merkin

That should be easy enough to scale down. The instructions on the chicken are scant at best, you know that they mean cooked chicken right?

frag420

Merkin wrote: »

That should be easy enough to scale down. The instructions on the chicken are scant at best, you know that they mean cooked chicken right?

Can you elaborate on the part in bold with regards to cooking times, temps, quantities etc? I figured it mayh be cooked chicken considering it was put in towards the end but glad of the clarification, cheers!

Alun

Actually I'd imagine it's going to be quite tricky to scale down some of the ingredients as it's clearly a recipe for making "industrial" sized portions, and uses, shall we say, unusual units.

For example, quantities of things like spices in domestic recipes are usually quoted in terms of teaspoons or tablespoons, not kg, so trying to determine how much powdered cumin, say, corresponds to 0.075 / 25 = 0.003kg, or 3g is going to require some experimentation, especially as most home kitchen scales, digital or otherwise, either aren't going to be able to register anything that small, or are going to be woefully inaccurate at that end of their scale. Same goes for 0.04g bay leaves Some things look a bit odd to me as well, such as only 3 tins of coconut milk in 50l of soup, which would tend to suggest these are 'catering' sized tins, not your average 400ml size.

Personally I'd just take the list of ingredients and make up the quantities myself as I see fit, but that's the way I usually cook anyway

Mellor

frag420 wrote: »

Can you elaborate on the part in bold with regards to cooking times, temps, quantities etc?

That recipe makes 50 litres. For 2 litres, divide everything by 25.

Cooking times and temps won't change from the recipe.
You still "fry still spices are fragrant", cool until carrots are soft etc.
The only part of the recipe text that you change is that you add 400ml of water in the middle. And make up to 2 litres at the end

Alun wrote: »

Actually I'd imagine it's going to be quite tricky to scale down some of the ingredients as it's clearly a recipe for making "industrial" sized portions, and uses, shall we say, unusual units.

In in kilograms. Probably the easiest unit to scale down, hardly unusual.

A digital kitchen scales can do 3g no bother.
The bay leave is going to be 2 or 3 leaves. You'll have to ask them what sized tine of coconut milk, At a guess that are prob 1 or 2 litres so OP needs to add about 120-240ml.

Alun

Mellor wrote: »

In in kilograms. Probably the easiest unit to scale down, hardly unusual.

I meant unusual in the context of a consumer scale recipe, and for those particular kinds of ingredients.

A digital kitchen scales can do 3g no bother.

It may well be able to display 3g, but that doesn't mean that what you have on there actually weighs 3g. Could well be 2, 4 or even 5g. Normal kitchen scales can be quite inaccurate at the extreme low (and high) end of their range. Precision <> accuracy.

Mellor

Alun wrote: »

It may well be able to display 3g, but that doesn't mean that what you have on there actually weighs 3g. Could well be 2, 4 or even 5g. Normal kitchen scales can be quite inaccurate at the extreme low (and high) end of their range. Precision <> accuracy.

A sim

Alun

Mellor wrote: »

A sim

Mellor

Alun wrote: »

It may well be able to display 3g, but that doesn't mean that what you have on there actually weighs 3g. Could well be 2, 4 or even 5g. Normal kitchen scales can be quite inaccurate at the extreme low (and high) end of their range. Precision <> accuracy.

Even with perfect accuracy 3g is going to be between 2.5 and 3.5g. It's ok to accept this variance though.
Remember there's just as much variance in teaspoon/tablespoon due to all the various factors.

Dubl07

It's mostly cumin, coriander and turmeric. They're relatively tongue-friendly unlike cayenne a gram or two difference won't kill the soup. For a two litre batch of soup, I'd probably use half a tsp of each spice. It'll be hit and miss but if you need more spice it's easier to add that (fry in a small pan with a dot of oil) than other tactics.

With the chillies, I'd advise extreme caution. A lot depends on how fresh the dried peppers are as well as their variety. I'd be inclined to err on the side of safety and present some minced fresh chillies/onion/tomato (salsa) to spoon into the soup as an addition according to personal taste unless you're making it just for yourself. If you go the salsa route, some coriander leaf is a lovely addition.

rubadub

Alun wrote: »

It may well be able to display 3g, but that doesn't mean that what you have on there actually weighs 3g.

My scales flickers around low weights, I have a small pocket scale that goes to 100g for small things.

Another trick is to put 24g of the ingredient on the scale, the divide in half & divide that in half & half that pile again to get 3g. Or put in 10 spoonfuls of ingredients and divide by 10 to estimate what 1 is.

Teaspoons vary in size, somebody had a problem with a cake that rose/did not rise in the baking forum after saying the followed the recipe exactly, but it only had "teaspoon" listed. In this day and age there is no excuse not to have the grams listed along with the ambiguous "spoon" listing, it was a recent BBC online recipe. Somebody said it didn't really matter, but obviously it does as there are loads of sites saying a reason for it rising/not rising is wrong amounts of raising agents. Seems to be a common problem.

Even in that UK bakeoff program with experienced bakers you heard them messing up by using too much raising agent. I don't think I have ever heard people messing up cakes by adding too much flour or sugar -usually because the recipe is clear so they add the right amount. If a recipe was

3 eggs,
5 g baking powder
100 teaspoons of flour
200g sugar

then I would expect issues with people getting the flour wrong.

Another issue with scaling recipes could be factors which remain the same, or which chefs presume to be the same. e.g. the power supplied. If you have a standard hob and they say heat up something until boiling and keep there for 5mins, then it might take 5mins to heat up a small amount, and 40mins to heat up a pot with 10 times as much, so you have prolonged the cooking time hugely by scaling up.