How to Properly Divide Ingredients While Making Recipes
The idea of measuring when you’re cooking may sound tedious and unnecessary, but it’s actually an important step in the cooking process. You can follow recipes to the letter or make your own concoctions, but if you don’t measure your ingredients, the results will probably be disappointing or even disastrous. Here are some tips on how to properly divide ingredients while making recipes to make sure your dishes turn out as intended every time!
Why divide?
It is important to divide ingredients while making recipes because this way you can mix up the flavors and make sure you have enough. If there is too much of one ingredient, it can throw off the balance of the recipe, so this helps prevent that. For example, if a dessert has a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of salt, but the recipe only calls for half a teaspoon of salt, you will need more sugar in order to even out the flavor. There are many other reasons why dividing is important as well: if a soup or sauce needs a little less milk than called for in the recipe then all it takes is adding more water or broth to reach the right consistency.
Is it worth dividing?
It is not necessary to divide, although it may speed up the cooking process. The time needed for each ingredient depends on the individual and their ingredients so there’s no universal amount of time needed. It also won’t affect whether or not you are following a certain recipe.
For example, if the recipe calls for 1 cup of flour and 1 teaspoon of salt, you can just add the flour without having to divide it in half beforehand. Same goes with cheese, butter, milk – anything that doesn’t need measuring precisely. However, if the recipe says 1/2 tablespoon of vegetable oil, then you should measure out 2 tablespoons before adding it to your food since that measurement is too small for accurate measurements when added at the beginning.
On what items should I be dividing?
The most important ingredient you should be dividing is butter, which can be cut in two different ways. One way is called the right way, the other is the wrong way. When you want to divide the butter into halves or thirds, use the right side of a knife and slice it along the inside line between both rounded ends of the stick. Make sure your hands are dry before trying this method. Keep in mind that if you only need one tablespoon or less, it’s usually best to just measure out what you need instead of using the butter-cutting method.
3 Tips for Dividing Ingredients like a Pro
- A lot of people make the mistake of simply dumping all the ingredients into one bowl and stirring them together. This will result in a recipe that isn’t as smooth as it could be and the mixture will be full of lumps, which is not great for your final product.
- Splitting ingredients between bowls is a great way to mix them better than if you’re just stirring in one bowl. It also ensures each bowl has the same amount of each ingredient.
- If you want your batter to be really light and fluffy, don’t over-mix it! Mixing too much can cause gluten formation in breads or cakes, which can lead to denser products.
4 examples where I divided in my own kitchen
When dividing ingredients with weight, use a digital scale. Some recipes call for one cup of brown sugar, others call for two. If you have a digital scale, set it to zero and place the bowl on top and simply turn the pan until you read 1/2 pound or 500 grams, depending on the unit of measurement used in your recipe. I weigh everything so there’s no guessing!
What you can do with the leftover portions
When dividing in half, make sure the halves are of equal size. This is essential if your ingredient cannot be easily divided (such as a chocolate bar). It’s best to use measuring cups and spoons as a guide, but it can also be done with kitchen utensils like an apple slicer or melon baller. Cutting foods into even pieces beforehand can help when you’re cutting down on food waste. The best way to divide up a muffin recipe is by using paper muffin cups and placing them equally on a cookie sheet.
Conclusion
After all of the work of creating a recipe, dividing up the ingredients can feel like one more step. It is important, however, because it provides flexibility in cooking and allows for leftover ingredients. If you are using perishable ingredients, it also ensures that you don’t have to cook all of the servings at once or let things go bad.
For example, if you are making pancakes with four eggs and need to divide them among four people, do so by each person taking two eggs. For dishes with powdered ingredients such as flour or sugar, divide them equally among the number of people. In this case, each person would take one cup of flour or sugar.
