Different ways of making food have different complexities. A chef in a restaurant who plates individual dishes will have different problems than someone who must cater an event of 100 seated guests. We started to learn this the hard way as we began to cook at home more often. To save time and money we wanted to cook multiple portions we could reuse to save time. This post will discuss some of our learnings and tips to make things easier.
It’s All About Heat Transfer
What we learned was that it came down to a few things such as:
- Volume and surface area of the item we were cooking.
- The amount of BTUs or heat your cooktop can produce.
- The amount of cooling you could apply through methods like an ice bath.
Here is where the bullets above come from. Only certain things can be cooked in large quantities at home. We caveat that your tastes may be different but recreating some recipes in the large is just not easy. The volume and surface area of the food combined with the type of cooking method you can apply is the limiting factor. The size of the surface area is what makes temperature management problematic. These issues are due to the thermodynamics concept of specific heat capacity which you can take our word about for now or read more here, here, and one more here.
A Couple Examples
Let’s talk about a couple of examples. This will be some nerd speak but is necessary to understand why some things do and don’t scale.
It is easy to increase a roast in volume from 4 lbs. to 6 lbs. The cooking method or cooling doesn’t need to be modified to work. Roasting is a slower cooking method designed for high volume-to-surface area ratios. If you increase the roast by 2 lbs. from 4 to 6 the result will still be close enough no changes are needed other than a bit more time in the oven.
Rather fry up some extra chicken or fish? These items have the opposite volume-to-surface area ratios as a roast. Frying, searing, and sauteing all are high-heat, fast cooking methods. When you add too much volume, most home equipment can’t provide the required BTUs to cook the food. The cooking method has to be modified to allow for batches that require more time.
What Worked and What Didn’t
Worked:
- Roasting meats, fish, and poultry scales well. It is just as easy to make ten pork chops as it is two.
- One-dish items such as Lasagna, Meatloaf, Casseroles, Stews, Sauces, Soups, and Chili all scale well with a caveat (see below, Didn’t Work)
- Vegetables, meats, and potatoes on the grill.
- Instant pots, Slow Cookers, and Dutch ovens all work well to scale up portions without increasing labor.
- Same-sized baked goods such as rolls, crackers, and granola bars were easy to scale up.
- Items that could be cooked on a griddle like pancakes and toaster biscuits (aka English Muffins)
Didn’t Work:
- Sauces and soups containing pasta or noodles.
- Rice other than minute rice.
- Increasing the size of baked goods like muffins or other quick breads.
- High-temperature dishes that require sauteing or searing.
- Pan frying or deep fat frying due to having to work in batches.
- Items that take up a lot of cooking area such as tortillas and pancakes due to the need to work in batches.
Why didn’t some of these work? The answer is that they either didn’t save time, had to be modified extensively or just plain didn’t turn out. Time savings was a large part of what didn’t work for some. Our premise in our other post is that for this to work effectively, it should save time. Some recipes are just too labor intensive when scaled up to be worth the time cost of extra portions.
Starches In Liquids Create Unique Problems
We also ran into some specifics with starches. Items like rice and soup with noodles are problematic enough to require a separate post. What confounded us was that some rice like Minute Rice or Basmati created completely different results than say Jasmine or Wild Rice. Here it is TL;DR; for now.
- Due to soups and sauces being mostly hot liquid, adding noodles to them will result in overcooking. This is because the larger the volume of soup or sauce, the harder it is to cool it to stop the cooking process
- Rice can be problematic at scale with standard pots and pans due to thermal transference. What ends up happening is part of the rice will undercook and part will overcook.
A Few Tips From Lessons Learned
Here are some tips to help when scaling up:
- Don’t increase the recipe yield by more than 4-6 extra servings.
- When possible, keep the same size baking dishes but use two to scale up. This keeps cooking times and methods consistent.
- Portion soups and sauces immediately into separate containers.
- Meats will be easier to slice if cooled in the refrigerator. Serve what you need, and place the remaining in the refrigerator before portioning.
- Before you make it, think about how it will be reheated. Microwaving soup will result in a good outcome but won’t be so great for fried fish.
Lastly, make sure it tastes ok, the recipe is ok and it will be ok after reheating before you scale up your portions. This was one of our hard lessons. If you make 20 portions of baked beans and the recipe doesn’t work, you are out all that labor. When you make 16 portions of something with a cream sauce, realize it may be a pain to keep it from separating when reheated. We will cover how we handle that in another post of sodium citrate.
The Take Away
Creating additional portions of food is not always as simple as adding more ingredients. In this post, we have covered only part of some of what we learned. In this post, we have discussed what has worked, and what hasn’t, and some reasons behind each. We hope it helps you ask yourself some great questions before starting to do this. Our additional hope it will help cut down wasted food while providing a better time management tool for working with your calorie budget.