Cooking is a chemical reaction
Certain things need a set quantity to work
For instance how small could you scale down making bread?
Surely at a certain point the yeast/sugar would not create a rise.
I'm not too sure what you're trying to say here haldi? You seem to be saying that scaling down has practical limits and can't be achieved because of constraints of chemical reactions?
I agree that cooking is partly chemical in nature, but it is partly physical too. Chemical reactions occur at the atomic and molecular level and, as such, are unlikely to present practical constraints to scaling down. Yes, things have to be present in the right (atomic and molecular) proportions, but yeast reacting with sugar will occur at the molecular level nevertheless.
Physical aspects are more likely to present practical constraints to scaling down; such as in the bread example you give. The smallest size of bread that could be produced would more likely be determined by an ability to maintain the breads physical attributes (e.g. pore size, crust thickness, overall structure, etc).
It will also be constrained by the physical aspects of the starting ingredients (e.g. particle size, morphology, etc). Nevertheless, I reckon it would be possible to make very small breads indeed (given the right conditions)?..undoubtedly smaller than is practical to consider in the context of this debate at least.
Nano-naans anyone?
I think there is something like this with the spices
I know one takeaway that uses a very hot "restaurant" spice mixture
Their curry base, however, is very mild
Therefore they cannot put much spice in
Scaling their recipe down to perhaps a six onion base simply doesn't generate the same intensity of aroma or underlying flavour
I'm confused by your argument here haldi? In theory, provided the same ratio of base to spice mix is maintained, the same hotness will be achieved? In theory, this could be done on a very small scale indeed (again, much smaller than is relevant to this debate). Maybe their practical limit is a pinch of spice mix to maybe 100ml of curry base?
I agree that you will not get the same overall "intensity" of aroma from a scaled down version (because their will be less of it in the air to smell!), but you would still get the same SPECIFIC "intensity" of aroma (i.e. per unit volume of base/spice mix). This would apply to the taste too.
One time I was at a takeaway when they were preparing the curry gravy
Part of the procedure was scooping off litres of oil from a boiling onion/oil/water/tomato mix and frying ginger/garlic puree in it
After five minutes they added loads of tomato puree and a large quantity of spice mixture (maybe 250g)
It was at this point that the wonderful indian restaurant aroma happened
It was absolutely amazing
And this aroma/flavour gets right into the curry gravy
Of course I tried this scaled down at home
Guess what?
It just doesn't happen
Very disappointing
I could see no point in posting another recipe that doesn't work
I put it to you that you are missing something else haldi? To my mind, the more probably variables are temperature and time. I firmly believe that you can successfully scale-down recipes if you pay sufficient attention to other factors such as time and temperature and overall heat energy and delivery of that energy. That's not to say that it is necessarily simply, just that I believe it is practically achievable.
Nano-madras anyone?
Topic: Curry Base - Scaling Up & Scaling Down (Read 11357 times)
