Cooking For Engineers

[Concsequ]

Does anyone know of a chart or listing of equivalent weights or "how much it takes" for foods?
I'm not talking about substitutions like making buttermilk with sweet milk and vinegar.
If one needs 2 cups of MASHED sweet potatoes, how many fresh sw pots does it take? That kind of thing.
There seems to be a whole universe of mechanical changes in foods that I am missing.
Thanks.

[McDee]

I was recently introduced to The Book of Yields in one of my classes. It has an amazing amount of information, but is geared for food service operations, so may have a lot more than you're looking for.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/047145785X

(I tried to make that link site friendly, please edit if I missed. )

[Michael Chu]

You can also try the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory at:
[url=http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/]http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/[.url]

If the recipe is calling for 2 cups of canned mashed sweet potatoes, you can probably make a fairly decent guesstimation by looking up the mass of 2 cups sweet potatoes, canned, mashed (510 g), then looking up the mass of 1 medium sweet potato, cooked, boiled, without skin (151 g). So, you'll probably need about 3 to 4 sweet potatoes.

If the recipe calls for mashing 2 sweet potatoes into two cups, then the USDA Nutrient Database shows sweet potato, cooked, boiled, without skin is 656 g, so we'll need 4 to 5 sweet potatoes.

Hope that helped somewhat.

[TunicaBaby]

Try this site. It has a lot of information, and you should find it helpful.

http://southernfood.about.com/library/info/blequiv.htm

TB

[carol916]

Try this link for Chef 2 Chef Recipes - Yields and Equivalencies

http://recipes.chef2chef.net/conversion/yield-equivalency-1.htm


It may not have everything you would ever need, but it has many of them.