How DO I Increase A Recipe ?

[Homestead]

Hi, I see a lot of recipes that call for 1 gallon of milk (hard cheese) and I use mother culture not powdered.  How do I increase the recipe.  An example would be my gouda recipe of 2 gallons of milk to 1/2 cup mesophilic and 1/2 rennet tab, how would I increase to a 4 gallon batch or a 2 1/2 gallon batch.  This is a big problem for me.

[Cheese Head]

Good question, we need to build a Wiki Article on Scaling Recipes, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Meanwhile, search on "Scaling Recipes" and you will the threads for scaling recipes up and down for starter culture, salt, rennet, & aging time. For scaling pressing weight and times (for those cheese types that are pressed, there are several threads/discussions/arguments in the Methods - Forming Cheese Board.

[mainelycheese]

Ah yes, good old conversion factors. Lets see if I can explain it.

Old yield
_______ = conversion Factor   (that is old yield, divided by new yield, = conversion factor)

New yield

So  if your original recipe is going to make 1 pound of cheese, and you need to make 4 pounds of cheese,  you would end up with a CF of 4.

Make sure all ingredients are in the same unit, (ie, oz, pounds, grams, gallons, etc) and you would multiply every item in the recipe by 4. The same is true for scaling down a recipe. If you can remember the formula you can scale up or down any recipe.