The case for minification

(aka: how to cook your way through multiple cookbooks when you're just a two person household!)

Apr 21, 2022

April 21st 2022

Today’s newsletter is actually in response to a reader request (!) but it’s also a post I’ve had in mind for a while as it’s something people often ask me about: minification/ how to “minify” recipes.

In a restaurant, given the chance for dessert, I’ll ALWAYS choose a few smaller items than one normal-sized item - especially when it comes to dessert! I can NEVER choose just one thing, which is why I love the idea of le café gourmand (^^^ above - a recent-ish trend from Paris/ France whereby you get tiny portions of few desserts instead of with your coffee instead of one full-sized portion and one of the popular classes I teach for Context Travel).

Even when it comes to breakfast/ snacks from a boulangerie, I prefer “minis” …

I guess I’m either indecisive or a gourmande LOL!

But what about when it comes to cooking and especially baking? Well I’m a minification master there too!

What is minification?

If you have ever read my blog, you might be aware of a couple of things:

I like cooking my way through cookbooks1 and
I quite often “minify” recipes (especially baking) because otherwise there’s no way we could eat all the food I would make.

Minification is, simply put, using math(s)2 for the greater good, i.e. baking! It’s halving, quartering, dividing recipes to make less portions (so, a cake that “serves 12” made into a smaller cake to serve 4 or even cupcakes).

Challenge: Recipe makes a giant cake and there are just 2 of you in the house?

Enter: 4-inch springform pans!

Wait, so it’s “Math(s) for Bakers?

Essentially, yes! Who would have thought that math(s) would become so important in my adult life? Certainly not me in Grade 10 as I chose “Maths 1A” (the “easy” option as opposed to the double subject “Maths 1 and 2”).

Me? I thought I would never use math(s) much in my life, I was into languages and drama (this, despite the fact that at age 15 I was already working as a cashier in a supermarket in an era when nothing was digitized and we had to count back the change instead of just dumping it in the customer’s hand and saying how much it is… Math(s) certainly came in handy then… but, I digress).

In fact, math(s) is one of the most important things to know as a cook/ baker if you want to be able to alter a recipe in any way. Luckily for you, all phones now have a calculator literally at your fingertips and hey, there’s always Siri and the internet to help out if you can’t figure something out on your own. I swear half of my Siri commands are “set a timer for X minutes” and the other half are things like “what’s 1/6 of 225g?” “what’s 454g divided by 12?” etc.

Hello 4-inch springform pans again!

Why should I embrace minification and math(s) for bakers?

If you love to bake but only have a small household and can only eat *so much* in terms of baked goods, minification is for you!
If you love a challenge (and a bit of math(s) to boot), minification is for you!
Small is cute (well, when it comes to baked goods, especially!)
It will get you thinking about favourite recipes in a different way and open the door to many possibilities (don’t have time to make a giant Hummingbird Cake? Make cupcakes!)

(when I taught in-person cooking classes at school - sigh, when will we get back to this? (again, I digress), I minified MANY recipes to make sure we completed things in the time we had - 1 hour…)

What do I need (to know) if I want to start minifying baking recipes?

So, you’ll need (to know) a couple of things before you set out on your path to minification:

Recipes which list ingredients in weight ~~are the best~~ are easier to minify because you have a solid number to divide. Recipes which list ingredients in cups are less precise when you minify them and things get fiddly. No matter how obsucre a weight is, it’s easy to calculate a smaller portion.
So, you’ll need a digital kitchen scale!
Look for the amount of eggs! Often, it’s easier to divide a recipe based on the number of eggs it contains. I’ve made the mistake to think I’ll just halve or quarter a recipe only to get to the eggs in the ingredients list and find it calls for “3 eggs”. How to halve 3 eggs? Well, actually if you have a scale, it’s pretty easy - break the eggs into a small bowl placed on yor digital scale and see how much they weigh then divide by 2. To *use* the eggs, you’ll have to whisk them and measure out half the amount. And then, you’ll have leftover eggs. So, sometimes it’s easier to start with the eggs and go from there.
Check what equipment you need. You’ll likely have to invest in a few key pieces of equipment but those will be items you use often. I love my
- muffin tins and mini muffin tins
- 4 and 6-inch tart pans and springform pans
- mini loaf pans (useful for making small quantities of things like brownies as well as actual mini loaves)
- small mixing bowls
- electric hand beaters (beating one egg doesn’t need you pulling out your stand mixer!)
- cookie scoops (for evenly distributing smaller quantities of batter in smaller tins)
- cookie cutters (round) for cutting small tart shells (generally speaking you’ll need a cutter a couple of centimetres larger than the diameter of a muffin tin to form a pasty round that works as a shell (it has to come up the sides of the muffin tin, not just fit inside it)
Figure out what sized baking tin you need. This is sometimes a bit of guesswork, a bit of common sense and a bit of Google! Generally speaking a 4-inch cake or tart is a generous individual portion which can also be shared (and if it’s a layer cake, it can even be cut into 4), a 6-inch tart or cake will serve 2 easily. Muffin-sized cakes and tarts are obviously individual serving. Play around but also…
Figure out your baking time. So you have a giant cake, say a bundt that serves 12. You decide to minify and make this in either mini bundt pans or muffin tins - how to know how long to bake for? Honestly? Google is your friend! I am often googling things like “mini bundt baking time” and I’ll look at a few different recipes to get an avergage time, then set my own timer for the lower end of the range, adding a minute or so at a time until it’s ready.