Batch Size Ingredient Adjustment
September 9, 2014 • By George WolferYear after year cook books are the most common type of new book published. I prefer cooking knowledge books, like the one pictured here, over exclusively buying someone else’s recipes.
After a meat plant’s New Product Development department small-batches an item, that they are ready to put into production, the next step is to adjust up the formulation. Even during everyday production there will still be times when a formulation needs to be adjusted for different batch sizes.
When producing artisan minimally processed meat containing products it’s normally most time & money effective for me to buy a case of either pork or beef shoulder roasts from my local wholesale club store; batch size adjustments are always needed.
The following is an example of how to easily adjust batch sizes.
Master batch ingredients for premium Goetta:
-16 pounds of lean, fine diced “All Natural” (not previously sodium phosphate enhanced) pork shoulder butt
-8 medium size onions, fine diced
-4 1/2 Tbsp. purified salt (today’s enhanced pork comes with some salt and water in it)
-9 Tbsp. leaf marjoram
-2 Tbsp. coarse ground black pepper
-5 tsp. sodium phosphate (do not add sodium phosphate if you starting raw pork was labeled tender and juicy etc.)
-16 cups of steel-cut/pinhead oats
-22 cups of water/broth
When the amount of starting raw meat is 5 pounds:
5 divided by the master batch meat weight of 16 = .313
-onions: 8 X .313 = 2 1/2
-salt: 4 1/2 Tbsp. X .313 = 1 2/3
-leaf marjoram: 9 Tbsp. X .313 = 2.75
-black pepper: 2 Tbsp. X .313 = 2/3
-sodium phosphate: 5 tsp. X .313 = 1.5
-steel-cut oats: 16 cups X .313 = 5
-cups of water/broth: 22 X .313 = 6 3/4
Example of a multiplication factor for when the new batch is larger than the master recipe:
20 pounds of meat divided by 16 = 1.25
8 onions X 1.25 = 10
multiply all other non-meat ingredients by 1.25.