Cooking 101: Recipe Conversion

August 12, 2008

This post is part of a series called Cooking 101, which introduces the basics of cooking. The series follows the book Culinary Fundamentals, with supplements from The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America. Check out the previous posts here.

Unit 6: Recipes and Food Cost

Being able to change the yield of recipes or convert unit sizes is important when following most recipes, especially if you have a book like Culinary Fundamentals, which presents recipes with ten serving yields (and I need two).

Unit Conversion

Unit conversion is helpful to memorize for the main ones, although it is occasionally handy to have a chart available. As my fifth grade math teacher taught me, remember the number 4228. Four quarts to a gallon, two pints to a quart, two cups to a pint, and eight fluid ounces to a cup. A cup is also equal to sixteen tablespoons and a tablespoon is three teaspoons.

For pounds, just remember sixteen ounces to a pound.

If you are on the metric system (which is infinitely more logical), it’s simple: a kilo-something is one thousand somethings, and a something is 1000 milli-somethings.

Remember that converting between weight and volume is not always equivalent. Eight fluid ounces does not equal eight ounces of weight. If you need to convert volume to weight, check out a site like this.

Recipe Conversion Factor

The must important number you’ll need is the Recipe Conversion Factor (RCF). To find this, first find your desired yield.

Desired yield = Number of Portions x Portion Size

For example, say you have six people that will be at dinner and you want to serve them two cups of soup each. 6 portions x 2 cups = 12 cups of soup.

Next, you need to convert the recipe yield and desired yield into the same units. Let’s suppose your soup recipe nets you two quarts of soup. As mentioned above, one quart is two pints and a pint is two cups, so….two quarts = four pints = eight cups.

Now, the fun part. To calculate your RCF, divide your desired yield by the recipe yield.

12 cups (desired yield) / 8 cups (recipe yield) = 1.5 (RCF)

To increase or decrease your recipe to the amount you want, multiply all the amounts by your RCF. To make twelve cups of soup, multiply each ingredient in the recipe by 1.5.

Next week we start Section 4 with Unit 7: Equipment Identification.

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