We've all been here...you have a cup of milk left in the fridge with a hankering for something tasty, but the recipe calls for a cup and a half of milk. Running out to the store just to get a little more milk feels like a pain...but you're jonesing for that delicious dish.
Fear not - for you can solve this dilemma with math! One of the main skills that professional chefs have in their food-brain arsenal is being able to scale recipes up and down to accommodate what ingredients they have in stock. Here's how...
- Take the ingredient you do not have enough of and divide it by the amount the original recipe calls for - this will give you a decimal ratio of how much of the total recipe you can make.
- Multiply that decimal ratio by all the other ingredients to get new measures of all the ingredients in the rest of the recipe.
So let's take a recipe from the delicious archives as our math example: Oat Granola. Here are the ingredients needed:
- 1/2 cup vegetable or canola oil
- 1 cup of honey
- 1 tsp of kosher salt
- 6 cups of old-fashioned rolled oats
The recipe calls for 6 cups of oats, but OH NOES! I only have 4.5 cups...math time - step 1!
Awesomeness - now we know that if we need to reduce all of the ingredients in the original recipe by 0.75...which brings us to step 2!
Whew! That was some great math! Now we have our new ingredients amounts to make this tasty granola:
This can also be used to scale up recipes too! So if you want to make this granola and have 8 cups of oats you want to use up, just do the same steps with "8" instead of "4.5".
Math is exciting, and so yes! I'm using a lot of exclamation marks! Also, all this math is making me hungry...good thing I now have tasty granola.
- 1/3 cup vegetable or canola oil
- 3/4 cup of honey
- 3/4 tsp of kosher salt
- 4.5 cups of old-fashioned rolled oats
This can also be used to scale up recipes too! So if you want to make this granola and have 8 cups of oats you want to use up, just do the same steps with "8" instead of "4.5".
Math is exciting, and so yes! I'm using a lot of exclamation marks! Also, all this math is making me hungry...good thing I now have tasty granola.