If I want to make waffles and the recipe calls for 1 pack of yeast for instance to feed 8 people and I want to feed 16 can I assume that I would need 2 packs of yeast?
That was just an example but I think you get the drift. Are all ingredients in a recipe scaled the same?
No, especially in baked goods.
I don’t know the specifics of yeast though.
Exactly - recipes scale linearly if it’s, like, a dip. They do not if it’s baking. Do not fuck around with baking.
Interesting . . . the baking textbook I’m currently copyediting permits linear conversion, but does explain that baking times, pan sizes, evaporation, and other factors come into play when scaling recipes up or down. So for instance, you could double the amounts for a muffin recipe and use twice as many muffin cups (duh). But if the doubled amount requires the use of a mixer, rather than mixing by hand, and you keep the mixing time the same, your batter might become overmixed, and your muffins won’t turn out right.
Or, if you’re cooking something in a certain size pan but you’ve doubled the amount, you still have the same surface area, so less evaporation per volume during cooking, so the cooking time may need to be increased. (Or something else may need to be adjusted. Me not professional cook.)
Paging Baker . . .
I scale things up all the time, regardless of the type of food I’m making.
If you made one batch for 8 people, then made another batch for 8 people, you’d use two packets of yeast. So what’s the difference if you made both batches in one bowl simultaneously?
It all depends on what you’re making.
Yeast products will require being adjusted the same amount as the other ingredients or it will take a different amount of time to rise due to the time yeast needs to multiply.
Baking will require adjustments in time to bake when you mess with the size of a cake. The batter might require an adjustment in time to get the egg whites fluffy and butter creamed. You’re often much better off to make batter two times if you want to make more cakes.
Candy making with heating to a certain stage like hard crack, can be messed up by doubling the recipe. It’s not so much a problem if you have a thermometer, but will be if you are going by 10 minutes at a boil for a recipe.
Making jelly can get messed up by doubling a recipe due to different evaporation rates and time to bring to boil. You really need to make one batch at a time if you don’t want to increase the chance of liquid jelly.
In canning you have to be careful to increase the hot bath time when you use larger jars. It will take longer to bring up the temperature so a smaller jar is better for many foods. Minimizing time at high temperatures reduces the nutritional breakdown.
As you can see the generalized rule is you increase the ingredients proportionately, but processes for making the food will sometimes need adjustment. More time can make up for less of a live agent added to food to make food. Chemical reactions will always require the same proportion of chemicals to react correctly.
I’ve never had a problem scaling any type of recipe and I cook and bake a lot. Then again, I also make sure it looks/feels/tastes right before I cook/bake it. If the dough doesn’t seem right, I fix it with more flour or liquid.
I’ve never had a problem with doubling or tripling a cookie or cake recipe, but I tend to be mixing until I reach a certain consistency, not for a particular amount of time. I also tend not to be making the fanciest of baked goods - you’re fine on chocolate chip cookies or basic chocolate cakes, but I make no promises about pastries or breads.
I’ve read that spices do not scale linearly. If doubling a recipe, one often wants to use either the original amount of a spice, or somewhere between the original amount and twice the original amount. Especially with strong spices.
Since I generally cook for just me, I do not have a lot of practical experience with this.
I realize it was just an example, but do you actually have a waffle recipe that includes yeast? That’s unusual.
Anything that’s meant to help things rise – yeast, baking soda, baking powder – can be questionable when doubling. Yeast probably most of all because of the aliveness of the whole process.
Liquids, as well, because the recipe may be assuming a certain amount will get absorbed and a certain amount will evaporate and the ratio may change if you use a different size pan, cooking temperature, whatever.
Generally, even in baking, it’s not a huge problem – not so huge that your entire recipe would fail miserably and you’d be left with nothing but broken dreams and inedible crumbs – but it might make your finished product more or less dense, higher, lower, wetter, drier, etc.
Examples, please? I’ve never tried adjusting a recipe and gotten different results than the normal sized batch, but my repertoire is sort of limited. Cookies, cakes, brownies and bread-things (biscuits, quick breads etc).
I would also like to add a caveat when it comes to flavoring.
For the love of god, NEVER increase teh amount of cloves in anything.
You know how clove is a ‘hot’ flavor, similar to cinnamon?
I have a killer apple spiced cyser recipe that I used to brew at least a couple times a year. We decided to make a quadruple recipe to take to Pensic for the 25th anniversary year [we were planning on going to lots of parties] and I used 4 times the fresh apple cider, added honey by hygrometer reading, then started simmering. I popped in the spice packet [it simmers for 30 minutes then you take it out.] I tasted, and it was a bt weak, so I made up a new spice packet, the same amount of spices [single recipe, it was going int a quad recipe.] Simmered for 15 mintues, took it out and tasted. It was like I was drinking straight clove. Hot beyond belief. It was if I had dumped the entire box of cloves in [and a grand total of 6 cloves should not have rendered 5 gallons of liquid undrinkable.]
We dumped something like 50 american dollars worth of ingredients as it literally was undrinkable. So we moved on, and found that doubling the rest of the spices for a quad batch worked well, but instead of doubling the 3 to 6 cloves, adding a single clove worked.
Rosemary has the same effect, as does thyme. For some reason, rosemary hypers into overpowering way too fast, to the point that I custom blend my own italian herbs and leave out the rosemary, and add just the amount that I need when I make large batches of stuff.
I’m having trouble understanding how these two situations give you different taste:
Simmer 2 one gallon potsof cider with X spice per gallon, then combine them for serving.
Simmer 1 two gallon pot of cider with X spice per gallon, then serve.
Conceptually, it makes a certain amount of sense, but I can’t put my finger on the mechanism by which the second scenario draws more flavor from the spice than the first. The spices are sitting in hot water, they don’t have an appreciably different experience with 2 gallons of water around them, vs 1 gallon. Imagine a third scenario:
Simmer 1 two gallon pot with X spice per gallon, but insert a divider in the pot just before the spice packets. How about if the divider has a hole in it?
Similarly with baking, if I want to make 2 cakes, what’s the difference between mixing in two separate bowls vs mixing in one bowl and pouring into two pans? The second option needs less baking powder? I’m not buying it. Unless baking powder is somehow deactivated by the bowl, the second option needs just as much BP per unit volume as the first.
When you scale things up , the differences in physically mixing the ingredients may cause you to need adjustments, but a simple double batch should use double the ingredients.
Man, I wish I’d read this thread last night before I prepared my no-knead bread dough. 1 packet of yeast works for 4 1/2 cups of flour, so 1 1/2 packets of yeast will be about for 6 1/2 cups of flour, right? As per the directions, I let it rise for two hours and refrigerated it in a closed container. As of this morning, it had doubled in size to fill said container. I hope my fridge door is still on its hinges when I get home tonight :eek:
Yeast-raised waffles were once news to me, too. But the SDMB actually turned me on to yeast-raised waffles a while back. After sampling their delicious crispiness and superior flavor, there’s been no going back.
There’s a recipe in the thread linked above. Goddamn they’re good. I must make some this weekend.
Of course you can scale when baking. Most bread recipes I keep use bakers percentages, which don’t give you any specific weights but rather the proportion (by weight) of each ingredient used. You scale up and down as you wish.
You only run into problems if you start altering the physical size of the final product. Making a boule may require different times and temperatures than making a 1 kg loaf. But that should be somewhat self-evident, I would think.
Absolutely. I make yeast pancakes too, and there’s really no contest; I will heretofore consider yeastless pancakes to be a last resort.
Here’s my guess: It takes longer to bring the 1 two-gallon pot to a simmer than it does the 2 smaller pots, so there’s more time for the spice to release flavor into the liquid, hence a stronger flavor.
Of course, there’s likely a true scientific explanation, but that’s the one I came up with. Alton Brown I’m not. 
Bread has better flavor when the yeast does a lot of raising before you punch down the dough and shape it. Bread needs to rise to at least double in size, and never seal the container. Cover it loosely with plastic or a damp cotton cloth.
I bet yeast pancakes are the same tasting as crumpets, which is a yeast batter fried on a griddle.
Thanks, I’ll try that next time. The bread turned out OK this time, but a bit tough. And the dough didn’t rise quite enough to reach the front door…