Reducing a recipe size and cooking times?

lucylu

Hi,
The majority of recipes I see are for 4, 6 or 8 people.
All I want to cook for is two.

Does anyone have a formula on how to reduce servings and cooking times due to smaller amounts of ingredients. ie 1/2 ingredients cook for 10 mins less
1/4 ingredients 15 mins and reduvce temperature by 10 c??

Or do i kick the ball and let God direct it???
Hate wasting food and hate having the same dish for breakfast dinner and tea!!

Any advice

chuckles30

It really depends on what you're talking about cooking............

For the ingredients, just use a half or third of it as appropriate. Regarding cooking times - it depends on the food really and you're going to have to judge it for yourself.....as you often have to do with recipes anyway.

Dizzyblonde

How about cooking the full amount and freezing the rest in protion sizes? Even roast meats freeze well if put in a ziploc bag with gravy. Then you'll have days when you don't need to cook at all.
If you're cooking things like curries etc in sauce on the hob or casseroles in teh oven, the cooking times will be the same no matter how little you're making.

The Sweeper

As chuckles30 says, it depends on what you're cooking.

There is no tried and trusted formula for reducing portion size and cooking time. A while ago I made a chocolate mascarpone cheesecake from a Delia recipe, but I didn't have the smaller, taller tin she baked it in. I dusted off my school math, did some volume calculations and I then made it in my larger tin, using proportionally increased ingredients (watching too much Numbers).

It was nice, and went down a storm, but it was broader and thinner than the small, thick result I would have had out of using the right sized tin. On top of that, the consistency wasn't quite right - instead of a blended mousse-type throughout, I just had that in the middle and the edges were a little overdone and so chewier - a combination of guesswork with the oven temp and it cooking quicker because it wasn't so thick.

Plus - as I'm sure you've discovered - a lot of recipe ingredients come in very specific sizes, and it is most economical to buy them that way e.g. 400g tins of tomatoes - if I'm making a tomato-based sauce and using one of those tins the finished product is always going to be more than enough for two people.

Dizzyblonde has a point about freezing the rest as well (though I'd disagree that you don't adjust oven cooking times for smaller amounts - again though it depends on the dish). If you're making spaghetti bolognese (to use a hackneyed example), make the sauce, boil just enough pasta for two people, serve and freeze the remaining sauce - make fresh pasta with it next time you're eating it.

Are there any specific recipes that you like making but want to know how best to prepare them for just two people?

lucylu

i do use the freezer but there are things that do not freeze welll at all for recipes like baked cheesecakes, quiches & pies, would you turn down the oven say 10c and let it cook for the same length of time or reduce the time cooking and leave at the same temperature?

chuckles30

For cooking things like cheesecakes, quiches etc, don't mess with the oven temperature at all - you need the recommended heat to cook it properly. I've doubled a quiche recipe with no problem, so I'm sure you could equally half it no problem. Same would go for cheesecake recipe. For the cooking times, you're just going to have to keep an eye on it......they will probably cook slightly faster......however it will be longer than half the recommended time for the full recipe.