Simple sums for a professional chefs two.
Now I have been asked a few times how do I work out what is what in a recipe. How do you know what you need in the recipe to make it go the right amount of people, or how do you know how much to buy to get the right amount of food to cook.
The answer is easy; all you have to do is work it out what you need to serve and what you need to make that. And to help you do this you need to know a few simple sums. And they are simple as I can remember them and work with them.
First thing that you need to know is what the yield of some thing is going to be. Now all depending on what you are doing you have three things to think of here. One it the preparation, second the cooking and thirdly the cooling.
Say for instant you have to make roast potatoes. You know that you want 100g per person , 100 people means 10kg
0.100x100=10
But if you peel the potatoes you have waste 10kg can become 8kg that makes you 20 portions short. Then when you cook them, they will lose weight as the cook. Then finally, when you let them cool by evaporation even more weight will be lost. Therefore, you could be looking at after all the cooking and cooling having just 7.200kg left. So what can you do to stop this for faceting what you buy and what you get at the end.
Let us say you are going to doing roast beef sandwiches for 100 people. You have to trim the meat, cook and then cool it. You need 80g of beef two slices per sandwich so you need 8kg cooked.
You trim it and lose 500g
Cook loss 2kg
Cooling you lose another 500g
Altogether you lose 3kg
Leaving you 5kg
So what you need to do is you divide the what you have left, 5kg by the original weight 8kg to give you 0.62 to find out what the yield is .
5.000÷8.000=0.625
Now divide 8kg by 0.625 to give you the amount that you will require to purchase 12.8kg.
8.000÷0.625=12.8
That is how to work out how much you need when you have cooked it. If you are serving it hot, you can just take into account that you do not need any cooling loss.
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