Why doubling a recipe isn’t always a simple matter of maths

Résumé détaillé

Scaling a recipe up or down is often more complicated than just increasing or decreasing the ingredients and cook time.

It seems simple enough: if the head count at your next dinner party doubles, the ingredients for your dinner do the same. Conversely, if you’re looking to scale down the size of your favourite cake for a late-night treat, you should be able to simply halve the recipe.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. You’ll probably end up with bland curry and sunken cakes if you don’t account for a few things first.

It’s easy to look at a recipe as a set of ratios you can multiply or divide at will. But recipe developers have to account for the physical and chemical processes that ingredients go through when you combine and cook them, and many of those processes don’t scale in lockstep with your shopping list.

Sometimes, making two batches of a recipe and serving them together is the safest way to ensure that you’re not walking into the pitfalls that inadequately scaling your recipe can present.

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