Least Counts

Whenever the CC reads a cookbook with the phrase, "This makes one cup of the spice mixture. It can be stored for future use", he rolls his eyes, and contempates ordering takeout.

Yes, we love cooking; yes, we are perfectly capable of spending hours to perfect a fine dish; and yes, we are willing to spend hours and days traveling great distances to find obscure ingredients.

But no, we do not wish to eat the same thing for the rest of the year, or even for lunch the next morning.

Shouldn't this be freakin' obvious?

So one cup of a complex spice mixture which takes an hour to make where the recipe calls for two tablespoons is a bit more than the CC's patience can endure.

What's the real problem? It's one of least counts really. To accurately render a recipe, you need to get down to fractional quantities which is not always possible.

What to do?

Scale down the recipe.

The CC has no problem down to 1/4th or even 1/8th of a tsp. He is perfectly capable of smashing an appropriate spice with his trusty pestle, keeping the appropriate amount, and discarding the rest.

However, scaling down is trickier than it sounds. To "correctly" scale down a "suitably large" spice recipe, one cannot just divide everything by 4 (or whatever.) Typically (but not always!), to do a good job, if you scale the largest stuff by 4 then you must scale the "intermediate" stuff by 3, and the smaller stuff by 2, and the smallest stuff not at all.

There is an intrinsic non-linear twist in the scaling down (the reverse for scaling up.)

Amateur chefs make this mistake all the time. They don't understand this.

And no, inspite of the CC's ultra-rational bent, he does not know why this is the "right" way to do things. He just knows empirically that this is the thing to do in many (but not all) cases.

Does the CC contradict himself? Very well then, the CC contradicts himself. The CC is small, and yet he contains multitudes.

Maybe the molecular gastronomy people would like to weigh in?

What to do after you've made the spice mix and used some but not all?

[1] Store some, and dump the rest, and call it a boredom tax. Yes, this is wasteful but eminently rational. (The spice mix will lose its potency before you ever reuse it.)

[2] Make the 1 cup version, and hand out as gifts to all your friends who will never make the recipe anyway. It will assuage your soul while it languishes in their spice cabinet, and they will toss it out at a future date. (You can short-circuit this process by tossing it out right away.)

[3] Buy a micro-scale (although it just might be cheaper to do the tossing because micro-scales are more expensive than spices. Yep, the CC is rational.)

[4] Have an array of powders some refrigerated and others not (as appropriate.) This assumes you don't live in Manhattan, London, Hong Kong, or San Francisco where space trades at a premium.

[5] Some pastes/powders freeze well. This actually works out in practice.

Anybody have better ideas on the subject?