Doubling, Halving a Recipe

[shel]

Some recipes say that they can be doubled or halved, others say that that doubling or halving can't be done successfully. Most recipes say nothing ... is there some way of knowing how well a recipe may be doubled or halved, or produced at some multiple of the original? Perhaps it's certain ingredients that will give the clue?

Shel

[KYHeirloomer]

Excluding some baked goods, I've never made a dish that couldn't be halved or doubled without problems. More than that in either direction could mean serious adjustments, particularly in cooking times/temperatures and in how the ingredients work with each other.

While it shouldn't be a problem for folks over here, on some other cooking sites I've found that people often don't understand the difference between doubling the size of something and doubling a recipe by using two of the same size.

That is, a recipe for a, say, 5 lb roast doesn't need significant adjustments if you're making two of them at once. But one ten pounder does.

They also seem to get confused over the importance of thickness. While much has been made over how long to cook fish based on its thickness, they don't understand that the same applies to other proteins. For example, a two pound flank steak that's an inch thick doesn't need any more time on the grill than a one pounder that's also an inch thick.

[siduri]

I'd say that baking can be a problem, esp if you make one big cake instead of two normal ones, because the large expanse of the cake surface requires less baking powder (this from the cake bible!).
For cooking i think the problem might be sometimes that if you are cooking a certain amount of cut up zucchine in a frying pan, they will cook in a certain way, but if you have double the amount in the same sized frying pan, they will come out differently, one will get a little browned, the other will sort of steam. Same for meat, double the number of pieces of chicken in the same sized pan will not brown as they should, so you would have to probably use two pans.