Mamta's Kitchen - A Family Cookbook





quantity of spices

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On 15/05/2011 09:05am, diane wrote:

I am making my favourite beef curry for the family and need to increase the meat quantity by 3. I don't know how to scale up the quantity of spices. Can you help

On 15/05/2011 09:05am, Askcy wrote:

Depending on exact recipes etc you could just make it in 3 batches then combine it...

If you have trebled the amount of meat I presume you are also trebling the amount of other ingredients (onion etc) and it would be more or less the same with spices.

However some spices may need a little less when making more. I'm thinking you might know about it if you put 3 times the amount of chilli in a dish or something like turmeric (haldi) might make it a little bitter if trebled. You might also not want 3 times the amount of salt in a dish...

Another thing to consider is how the cooking will be affected by having more in.

I have 2 recipes for making spicy chicken wings, one for bulk and one for a few. The reason being the original recipe I came up with was all done in one frying pan with the chicken added into the sauce. To do the same for a lot of chicken would need a giant frying pan. So I make the sauce in one pan, fry off the chicken in batches and then combine the lot to go in the oven..

So when making something in bigger batches you might find say browning the meat may need to be adjusted. Where the smaller batch will be in a hot frying to brown the meat, if you try to do the same in bigger amounts it will cool the pan down more, more moisture will be going into the pan from the meat and instead of browning it will be stewing in the juices. You might have to get the pan hot, do a smaller batch and then put them to one side, then let the pan heat up again and do another batch etc (which again will come up with its own problems as the pan starts to get clogged with all the bits and might burn)

Hope this is some help

Steve

On 15/05/2011 09:05am, Winton wrote:

If you are tripling the beef I would just triple all the ingredients. (I'm fresh back from Mamta's workshop where we were doubling up on everything - except the cooking times!)

If anything I would be tempted to cook 3x the beef and 4x everything else.

Winton

On 15/05/2011 03:05pm, Lapis wrote:

the point that Steve mentions is, I think, a very valid one. A lot of meat takes a lot longer to cook that less, so although cooking times should not change, in reality, because of the need to keep cooking temperatures up, it usually does. Frying the meat in batches makes a lot of sense.

On 16/05/2011 06:05am, Mamta wrote:

If you are only doubling a recipe, then it does not make a huge difference, but I tend to use a bit less of things like turmeric, salt, chilli etc. and adjust them later, once the 'masala mix' is nearly ready. You noticed Winton that when you guys were adding second amount of the spices to aubergine stuffing, I asked you all to reduce the turmeric and chillies to a little bit less than double? But if you are cooking huge amounts, I guess you will have to measure to be anywhere near accurate. I can't explain it logically, but less seems to suffice in doubling a recipe.

If the spice and salt amount in the original recipe is even slightly too much or too little, by the time you multiply the recipe several times, say 20 times, your error will be multiplied to a huge 'off'. So, my instinct is to add a bit less, especially in case of chillies and turmeric (too much turmeric can make a dish a bit bitter...ish), and then taste the 'masala' mix when nearly ready and adjust as needed.

By the way, we nearly had a disaster during our course on Saturday; I was adding the spices to the curry sauce for the doubled amount of meat balls, while another person read out from the recipe. I picked up the hot chilli powder jar by mistake instead of sweet pepper jar and added that in it's place! Paprika is for colour and its amount is obviously a lot more than chillies. The person reading the recipe stirred it slightly as I added each spice, but thankfully not too much after chillies. I suddenly realised my mistake and removed the portion where most of the chillies were. We increased the amount of gravy back to needed amount by adding a bit more tomato pur?e and extra spices we didn't have time to fry and add more onion, ginger and garlic as well. If I was not cooking to a timetable, I would have done that. It worked out well in the end! Phew!!

On 17/05/2011 11:05pm, Heather wrote:

I made the chili powder instead of sweet paprika mistake about 6 weeks ago when I was making Mamta's chicken curry with saffron recipe for dinner after work one evening. I must have been tired because I had both jars out on the bench and just used the wrong one without realising it. I didn't work out what I had done until I tasted it - though I tried to dilute the heat of the sauce in various ways it was ruined.

On 18/05/2011 10:05pm, Jayne Richardson wrote:

Hi

I would like to join the forum for Mamta's Kitchen. Please can you send instructions on how to do so.

Many thanks

Jayne Richardson

On 19/05/2011 10:05am, Kavey wrote:

Jayne, there is no joining to be done, you simply post, as you just did!

The login button is only for those of us who run/ administer and moderate the website.

Welcome!

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