Need help scaling down some italian recipies.

Cafe Society
1

Some time ago, I aquired a recipe book that has some very good recipies in it. Unfortunately, I rarely need to feed fifty people, and some of the units are a bit unusual. I figured there must be a few people with experience particularly in the resteraunt business that might be able to help translate some of these units.

Alfredo Sauce:

2 gal milk
3 lbs butter
9 lbs cream cheese
1 1/2 tsp Nutmeg
1 bucket Romano cheese

Heat milk and margerine to 180˚F. Add cream cheese and cook until sauce is creamy. Remove from heat. Add romano cheese.

Actually, that doesn’t seem as difficult to convert as I thought. It is the best alfredo sauce I have ever had though. All others are runny and tasteless IMO. I usually have to drown alfredo sauce in parmasian cheese to make it palletable, but this stuff is good as is. I would probably up the nutmeg a bit and add some white pepper.

Pasta Dough:

2 pitchers eggs
3 pitchers semolina
6-8 pitchers flour
1 cup salt

Add eggs and semolina, then add 5 pitchers flour. Add remaining flour as needed.

I have a pasta maker, so I can figure out the rest, but where do I get semolina and what does a pitcher of eggs break down to?

And what the heck is whirl?

2

I think the key is that you want 2 units of eggs for every 3 units of semolina and every 6-8 of flour. So if you use 1/4 cup of semolina, you will want 1/2 cup of flour (or a bit more), and 1/3 cup of eggs.

ETA: And I guess 1/2 cup of salt :smiley:

3

I guess then I need to measure the volum of an egg. That’s pretty simple. I don’t know where to get semolina though. I think I can estimate the salt pretty well.

In the first recipe, I’m guessing that a bucket of Romano is about a gallon. Actually, when I got this book a quarter of a century ago, I remember thinking some of these would be a lot harder to translate to kitchen units than they are.

What would a box of frozen spinach be though? One of the recipies is for spinach noodles and it calles for a box of frozen spinach. What sort of unit would a resteraunt buy frozen spinach in?