How much does a cup of Nutella weigh?

Question

I want to make Nutella cookies. I've found a recipe for it, but it's in volume measurements. It asks for a cup of Nutella and I don't own a cup.

I tried searching my regular converters, but the only one with a hit was Wolfram-Alpha and I've noticed this result can be quite wrong.

Is anybody kind enough to weigh a cup of Nutella? Or do you use a converter that knows the weight of a cup of Nutella?

Note: I do own a tablespoon measure, so if nobody knows, I'll just scoop out some and calculate it myself. And post it as an answer of course.

Asked by Mien

Answer

According to the nutella nutritional fact label, 1 tbsp = 19g.

There are 16 tbsp in a cup so 16 * 19g = 304g

Answered by Jay

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Is there any truth to the idea that you shouldn't multiply seasonings when multiplying a recipe?

Question

I often hear cooks discuss that idea that if you are multiplying, say, a recipe for 4 to be a for 32, that you shouldn't multiply some herbs, spices, or salt. I've never understood any reason why this should be true. Maybe something to do with surface area to volume ratios, or cooking times? Does anyone have a real explanation, or is this nonsense?

Asked by Michael at Herbivoracious

Answer

The notion that salt or spices specifically don't scale linearly sounds like nonsense to me. In any recipe involving salt and water, the salt is dissolved, so all that matters is the concentration, and that concentration is going to be the same with linear scaling.

Scaling in general is problematic when scaling more than 2x or 4x. When you take into account that:

• Recipes targeted at home cooks are imprecise to begin with and often use volumetric measurements that are sensitive to heat, humidity, and other environmental conditions, so the imprecision is magnified at larger scale;

• Larger portions of food may get cooked less evenly and/or at less consistent temperatures due to the volume/surface area ratio; that part is correct, but it has nothing to do with salt, it has to do with your equipment. On the stovetop, most of the heat is coming from the bottom of the pan unless you use induction, and even in an oven you've got one or two heat sources radiating heat in a specific pattern.

• Cooking times are also going to vary due to changes in things like rates of evaporation. The total amount of heat you're able to deliver at any given time generally does not increase as quickly as the amount of heat you need to deliver, so very often you need to increase cooking times.

I'm sure you probably already know all this, but the reason I'm pointing it all out is that I'm pretty sure that this odd-sounding assertion about non-linear salt/spice scaling is due to some mutation or misunderstanding of general scaling issues.

Probably, salt and spices are typically present in very small quantities in most recipes, and those quantities are already wild guesses much of the time, so the effect of compounding all this wild inaccuracy, especially with volumetric measurements, is actually pretty noticeable at large scale. Scaling sucks with these ingredients because the initial quantities and scaling method are both nonsense.

Assuming you have a precise recipe that gives weight measurements, and you scale by weight, then you're not going to have any problems as long as you either cook it in batches or adjust your cooking time/temp accordingly.

I suppose I could be wrong, but I spent 20 minutes digging for some evidence to contradict my claims above and came up dry; you'd think that somebody would have presented some evidence if the claim were true.

Answered by Aaronut

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Scaling problems with a cake - mousse layer increases more than other layers

Question

We've come up with a recipe for a cake that has four different layers (a dough base plus fillings) and is then covered in chocolate mousse. We tested that recipe as a small sample and concluded that the ideal proportion was to have 70 grams of base layers for 80 grams of chocolate mousse, creating a tight cylindric 150 gram cake. So far, so good.

We then proceeded to make a bigger version, with a wider mold, which would weight 1.88 kilograms, so we scaled our recipe and found out that 875 grams of base layers for 1kg of chocolate mousse. But the problem is, the mousse layer becomes so large that it collapses.

Fixing this is fairly obvious: use less mousse. Maybe, since the mousse is less dense than all the other layers, increasing its total weight has a much bigger impact in terms of volume. But how can we define our recipe in terms of volume rather than weight, then?

I feel like we're missing something very obvious here, but if the proportions of the recipe are the same as the small, initial version, why do we get such different results? How can we scale the recipe in order to achieve a consistent amount of mousse, regardless of the size we attempt to make (i.e. what kind of math is required to make a 1kg, 2kg and 3kg cake from one single recipe / set of proportions, considering it's even possible to do so)?

Answer

Density = mass / volume, so if you double the mass of mousse, the volume should also double. The only way you can get more than double volume is if the density decreases, which I doubt is happening.

If you're covering the sides and top with mousse, than mass--which is directly related to volume--isn't going to help, you need to think about surface area. For a cylindrical cake frosted on the sides and top, the surface area and volume are

SA = pi d^2 / 4 + pi d h
 V = pi h d^2 / 4

with d the diameter and h the height. You could imagine two cakes of the same mass, one thin and very broad with a very big surface area, the other a bit tall and small around with much smaller surface area. So you'll need to take both height and diameter into account when figuring how much more mousse you need.

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Scaling up a risotto recipe x4. Things to consider?

Question

I am making risotto for a Christmas dinner, serving 20 people. I plan to multiple the recipe by 3 or 4x. Since risotto is a challenging dish at the normal scale, how can I ensure getting good results when multiplying the recipe?

Answer

If you haven't done it before don't do this for Xmas day, it's not worth the risk. Always practise on less important occasions

You need a wider, rather than taller pot. Nearly a paella style pan. And a strong arm

Ingredients wise, I don't know of any magic scaling tricks for risotto

The hardest part is stirring enough, but not too much, and doing an even job of it

Probably easier to have two pots going at the same time, rather the one large pot. Then you can have two different flavours going!

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