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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

A pretty basic point to make here is that many recipes --- perhaps most --- don't scale linearly with ingredients. There's usually a core ratio you can distill out that can scale arbitrarily, but then tweaks to other parts of the recipe.

The bigger problem I have with every service like this is that the recipes are untrustworthy. For instance, I'll generally avoid recipes from Epicurious. The curation problem here seems hard.

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Can you please share why you avoid Epicurious?

The recipes they have from Gourmet seem to me to be the best large collection of online recipes: diverse, well-written, tested, proofread, and forthright in their descriptions of each dish. They often have helpful user reviews as well. Some recipes tend to be more time consuming or require rare ingredients or equipment. But generally I'm relieved if (assuming I've already exhausted my proper cookbooks) Google gives me an Epicurious/Gourmet recipe as opposed to another site. The Bon Appetit, Shape, and other recipes on Epicurious aren't as uniformly good.

What are other sites that you do prefer? I'd be happy to discover something better.

Cooks Illustrated is pretty much the only website I regularly pull recipes from. I've taken some things from eG, since so many pros used to be on there. On the rare occasions that I ask Google to find a recipe, I'll take a FoodTV recipe if it's from a show by someone who actually owns a restaurant.

The rest of the Internet is rife with people who think mayonnaise goes in Caesar Salad.

Genuine question on this. Why can't you just scale a recipe directly? Are there ingredients that play a binary role (so to speak) so they just need to be present regardless of the quantity? What am I missing here?

I cook a lot and cannot think of any totally non-scaling ingredient, although some things go out of proportion a bit; e.g., the relative volume of water used to cook rice goes down as the recipe grows.

I feel like this is pretty well known; not that recipes can't be scaled, but that you can't reliably do it by multiplying the ingredients.

I just flipped through Ferran Adria's "The Family Meal", which is a record of every house meal served at El Bulli, each of which is scaled to 2, 6, 20, and 40 people. Sure enough, almost none of them scale every ingredient linearly (Caesar salad and hamburgers did, because you just make more dressing or more patties for more people).

In particular: oil, butter, lemon juice, onions, and intensely flavored seasoning ingredients (herbs in particular) often scaled by 2x when the servings scaled by 3x. In some places, an ingredient scaled by more than 3x to make 3x as many servings. Salt went in both directions.

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