Muffins: Increasing individual ingredient amounts when increasing overall recipe size mix
Hi,
I’m writing for advice on tweaking a muffin bread recipe. It’s base is Fiber One breakfast cereal which I pretty much grind up with a blender. The original recipe from the Fiber One box was for muffins.
I followed this with a few tweaks and took to making ever greater quantities. Originally, it was five times the original adapted muffin recipe. Then it was eight. As I ran out of muffin pans, I started using bread tins. Soon I found I preferred the bread to the muffins and now make only breads.
I now intend to make ten times the amount of muffins/breads specified in the original adapted recipe in one bake. My concern is if I should be multiplying all the ingredients in the original adapted recipe by ten. Or, for example, do I need to increase the baking soda by the same amount as I increase the milk and eggs? I also wonder if I can cut down on the brown sugar since I’m on the edge of being diabetic (my fasting blood sugar readings are always pushing 110 and my father had diabetics).
A final issue I have is the baking temperature. I have been using one and two pound baking tins to make my muffin bread with my electric oven set to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. I line the tins with aluminum foil and then grease this foil with lard.
At this temperature, lining and greasing, the muffin bread takes about 45 to 55 minutes, sometimes even more, to bake (defined traditionally as a knife coming out of the bread center clean). Unfortunately, at this temperature and pan lining/greasing, the breads can be blackened or even burnt on the outside.
So I am wondering if I should lower the temperature to 350 degrees Fahrenheit or even 325. I would very much welcome your thoughts and advise on this issue.
As to the balance of ingredients in my recipes, including the original Fiber One Recipe, they are given in the table at the top of this post..
I would again be grateful for you thoughts and advice as to how I might modify the various ingredient amounts as I increase the overall recipe volume I am mixing at any one time, especially the amount of brown sugar I am adding.
I thank you most kindly in advance for you help and advice. I will very much appreciate it.
Stay well everyone, and keep on baking!
Advice here from Cook's Illustrated:
Our findings? To convert a muffin recipe to make a loaf, set the oven rack in the middle position, decrease the oven temperature by 50 degrees, and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf matches the visual cue (either “with few moist crumbs attached” or “clean”), 60 to 70 minutes. Recipes with sugary toppings like streusel should be tented with foil during the last 20 to 25 minutes to prevent them from getting too dark.
I don't think you need to make any changes to the leavening as you increase the recipe.
Sugar:
When you converted from muffins to bread you increased your sugar from 40% of the flour by volume to 50% of the flour by volume. So I'd start by going back to the original ratio, which would be .8 of a cup per loaf. So that's a little more than 3/4 of a cup per loaf. (This would be easier by weight, by the way. Doing it by volume is kind of problematic and can lead to errors.) Anyhow. 20 cups of flour, times .4, equals 8 cups of sugar, not 10.
After that, you can play around with adding applesauce if you reduce the sugar more. Sugar adds moistness as well as sweetness and applesauce seems to work pretty well for people. At least I have seen it recommended often. You could try replacing half the sugar with applesauce, leaving you with 4 cups sugar and 4 cups applesauce in your recipe. You will need to reduce the other liquids by 3-4 tablespoons for every cup of applesauce added.
I would start by making only one loaf at a time, using 2/5ths of a cup of sugar, 2/5ths of a cup of applesauce, and reducing the milk to ...
well, hmm.
You also changed the milk-to-flour ratio when you made it into a bread. Instead of 87.5% milk cups to flour cups, you have .75.
So the good news is, you already reduced your liquid, so adding the applesauce in shouldn't be a problem.
Anyhow, go ahead and lower the oven temp, bake for longer, lower the sugar, and maybe sub applesauce for half the sugar. See how it goes. When you get it the way you want, scale your recipe up. But, a word of advice, it would be much better to scale up using weight, rather than volume. Using volume has a tendency to introduce measurement errors, and in large batches that can be disastrous.
Good luck!