I'd like to add this comment to the thread in order to provide some leeway to both sides of the argument and allow for reasoned debate pending scientific input, if any can be found. Possibly someone with direct experience in large volume cooking of curry can contribute to this discussion.
The BIR method recipes are given using accepted (sometimes even uniform) measures, but anybody cooking them is likely to modify to their own taste, or not use these measures exactly, and so differences will occur from one person to the next and one session to the next. I rarely use a tsp or TBSP any more as I just sort of know approximately what they look like and realise that it isn't critical. Different batch, brand, variety or freshness of spices will be another contributing factor in variation to flavour and heat level. In terms of the BIR cooking method, anything more than a double serve quantity is probably not going to be prepared in an aluminium frying pan, and so by that reasoning a direct linear doubling of spices is the normal and acceptable approach. The thing is that using the X 1.5 approach would probably provide a dish with very little, if any, discernible difference, given the above listed variability factors. After you'd cooked a dish once, either way, you'd simply adjust it for your next visit. I would,
However, once you start to get to the second iteration of doubling to 4 serves, and certainly doubling again to 8, you are looking at a different cooking mechanism. The ability to flash fry over high heat is reduced significantly. As SS has already pointed out, this change in the cooking dynamic may have something to do with the flavour and heat transfer from the spices. Note: may have! I don't know definitively. What I can say is that when I cooked large batches of mild curry in a modified BIR style, the reduced spicing provided the dishes with adequate and acceptable spicing. I don't know what the result would have been had I scaled linearly. They were mild curries to start with and remained mild. A Madras or a Vindaloo may be a whole different scenario. I would possibly consider doing 2 X double serve to get 4 serves but I wouldn't do 4 X to get 8 and I certainly wasn't going to do 10 X to get 20 serves of a single dish.
Many non-restaurant takeaways out here have their main curries batch cooked and sitting in heated bain maries. I have witnessed the counter attendant call out to the cooks that more of a particular dish is required and then seen a new container brought out to replace the old. Not added to it by the way. They usually have a blank space in the rack to facilitate this procedure. I would doubt that this style of cooking is done in single or double serves. I do not know if these large batch dishes are prepared using linear or non-linear scaling. I will ask my man K if he is familiar with this process and his "chef's view" on levels of incremental spice scaling.
One of the links in my previous post instructs to add chilli in 3 stages when you are trialing a new increased quantity recipe. I'm not sure how adding raw chilli to a dish at the end of cooking, or even in the middle, would work out though.
Topic: Scaling spices and bulk cooking. (Read 29850 times)
