Batch cooking has become an increasingly popular form of cooking in the fast-paced modern life. It ensures that you can spend as little time in the kitchen as possible while still having plenty of food to see you through a busy week.
There are many benefits to batch cooking or even simply doubling your recipe to help you get more food for the effort you are spending in your kitchen.
But when you change the recipe by making more servings than the recipe intended, you need to account for how that change will affect the rest of your recipe, such as its cooking time.
When you double a recipe you are following, you do not need to double the time you need to cook the dish for. That being said, depending on how you cook those extra portions, you may need to extend the cooking time by 5 to 10 minutes.
Does the Dish Affect How Long to Cook a Doubled Recipe?
There is very little to stop you from doubling a recipe, but no matter what recipe you double, the cooking time of your recipe will need to be revised.
How you change the cooking time will be influenced by not only the type of dish you use to cook the recipe but also the size of the dish.
One way to cook your doubled recipe is by using a larger dish to cook all of the recipe at once. For example, if you are cooking a cake and want to make a larger cake to feed more people, you can simply use a larger cake tin.
Using this method will mean that you will need to lengthen the cooking time of your dish, but not straight away.
Add 5 to 10 Minutes to the Cooking Time
Cook your doubled recipe to the specifications listed in your recipe. Then cook it for a further 5-10 minutes. After this extra time, check on your dish to see if it has fully cooked through.
You may find the middle of the cake to still be raw, for example. If this is the case, continue to cook your dish in 5 or 10-minute increments until fully cooked.
Depending on the dish you use, and how effective your oven is, you may find that your doubled batch took double the amount of time to cook after all.
However, this should be treated as a coincidence rather than a rule of thumb.
Use Multiple Dishes
A quicker way to cook your doubled recipe is to use multiple dishes of the same size and depth and separate your recipe into multiple batches.
This way you can use the cooking time outline in your recipe as you will not be changing the overall volume of the batches, rather cooking more than 1 at once.
The only issue with this method is that you may not have multiple of the same kind of dish to cook the extra batches of your recipe in.
You can always cook the batches one at a time, but that will take longer overall as you will have to wait for the first batch to cook fully first.
Can You Double Any Recipe?
There is really no limit to the recipes that you can double. You can double cakes, sauces, meat dishes and a whole range of other dishes or snacks.
However, the thing to remember when you double your recipe is that not all recipes can be doubled in the same way.
All you will have to do when doubling some recipes is measure out two times the ingredients you need to use and carry on the recipe as usual.
But for others, you will need to alter your ingredients in small increments to prevent overpowering your dish. Or, as is the case for rice, doubling the amount of rice does not necessarily mean doubling the amount of water.
Baking recipes are the easiest to double as they are straightforward and only require you to times the ingredient list by two. Main dishes and savoury foods cause more issues when their recipes are doubled.
Luckily most online recipes nowadays give the option for you to double the recipe automatically, so you don’t have to worry about the logistics of doubling a recipe.
However, you should still be wary and check the measurements and instructions to ensure that they still line up.
Do You Halve Cooking Time When You Halve The Recipe?
Just like when you double a recipe, halving a recipe will drastically affect its cooking time.
Our first instinct would be to presume that a recipe using half the amount of ingredients would take half as long to cook, but following this logic may lead to a severely overcooked or undercooked dish.
Instead, you should consider the type of dish that you cook the halved recipe in and how that will affect the cooking time.
For example, if you follow a simple cake recipe and half the ingredients yet use a deep but small-diameter cake tin, it will still take a while for the centre of the cake to cook thoroughly.
Likewise, if you use a very shallow but wide cake tin for the same halved recipe, it will take no time to bake at all.
The best way to determine the cooking time of your halved recipe is to use your own judgement and check your dish often.
When you know you plan on using a shallower but wider dish than the recipe instructs, do not leave your dish to cook for too long before checking.
If you are using the same sized or deeper dish, then halve the original cooking time and use that as a rough estimate for when to first check your dish. Then continue to cook the dish in 5-minute increments until fully cooked.
Double Recipes FAQs
If you have further questions about doubling up recipes and how that impacts the way they are cooked, then check out these FAQs:
There’s more to scaling recipes than just the time. You need to make sure the ratios are also the same when scaling up or down. You will also need to scale up the size of the dishes you use to cook in.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from increasing or decreasing the quantities of any recipe. But, you will have to adjust the time accordingly.
Sources
Where we obtain our information and verify the facts in this article:
Kitchen Aid
A guide to scaling recipes safely
Delia Online
How to scale recipes up and down
Acacia may be a freelance writer by day, but they are a food fanatic by night. They are always trying out new recipes or finding different ways to elevate classical dishes. But their biggest culinary aim is to educate others on the basics of the kitchen so that they too can enjoy delicious food.
