Serving sizes are kind of an arbitrary measurement, in my opinion. Perhaps I don’t understand the logic in what companies consider a serving. I feel that servings should represent something tangible and realistic – like a bowl of soup or a burger patty. If there are 4 servings, it makes 4 bowls (still subjective, since bowls have varying sizes). Having said that, I almost always have leftovers when I cook. For a couple of days, this is a non-issue, as I’ll usually have no problem eating leftovers for at least a day or two before needing to move onto something else. This means either freezing, throwing out, or giving away the leftovers. I hate throwing out food and sometimes I just forget that I froze something. This method of cooking is great if you ever get sick and need to not cook for a few days. If you’re not a leftovers person, then you need an easy method to reduce the amounts of ingredients. Inversely, if you’re having a party and need to make more, you also need an easy method to increase the ingredients. Either way, this should be a no brainer.
One of my goals in presenting recipes to you, the masses, is to put the recipe front and center in a way that is delicious, easy to make and flexible enough to feed one person, a family, or a party. If you’re only cooking for one person and the recipe makes 8 servings, do you really want to make that much? With today’s technology, there are websites and/or phone apps that will let you enter a recipe and then increase or decrease as needed.
What if we did some of that work for you, so you can make as much or as little as you like, at any time you like? Any recipe posted on Big Meaty’s BBQ, if it has serving sizes, will be written in a way so the recipe can be easily adjusted. Additionally, each recipe will adjustable down to a single serving. For instance, if you go back to the Basic Burger recipe, you’ll notice that this recipe serves 4. If you click the + next to the number, it will increment the number of servings by 1. Likewise if you click the – next to the number of servings, it will decrease the number of servings by 1, all the way down to 1 serving.
Next to the number of servings is a set of multiplier buttons, which will let you multiply or divide the recipe appropriately, so you can cut the recipe down to 1/8th of the recipe or increase it up to 8 times the recipe. Any more than that, you’re on your own. In some cases, this could get ridiculous. I chose these increments to give enough flexibility in deciding how much or how little you want to make. The math may get a bit weird. For instance, if you take 1/3 of the burger recipe, it makes 1.33333333 burgers. What you really end up with is a 1/4 lb burger and whatever 1/3 of 1/4 lb is (0.083333333). In simple terms, you get a burger and a mini burger. The point that in some instances, the math may not make sense and in this case, you end up with a larger than initially planned burger.
It’s important to note that the multiplier and the number of servings does not affect the cooking time. You will need to adjust this yourself. In a way, the cooking time will be depending on how you intend to cook the recipe. For instance, lets say you did 8x the burger recipe. That’s 32 burgers it would make. Maybe you’re throwing a party and you’re getting the grill out where you can get 16 on at a time. Perhaps you’re cooking these burgers for later and are making them on your stove or Foreman Grill. The decision is yours and thus its hard to estimate the cooking time. To be fair, I considered not even putting cooking times into these recipes. But it is useful information.
I’m a proponent of the ‘I won’t ask someone to do something I’m unwilling to do’ mentality. These are recipes I’ve used and features I’ve looked for on other websites for while. I hope they’re as useful to you as they are to me. If I’m missing something, let me know and we’ll see what we can do to make the experience easier. In the meantime, happy cooking!