Math and Cooking - Know Thy Fractions

So you think math does not come in handy in day-to-day living? What about in cooking that delicious Mrs. Dash Oriental Baked Chicken dish? You know that one that requires 1 Tbsp. Mrs. Dash Extra Spicy Seasoning Blend, 6 (4 oz.) boneless skinless chicken breasts, 2/3 cup oriental plum sauce, and 1 Tbsp. lite soy sauce. Now this recipe calls for 6 breasts of chicken. So what do you do when you have only four? Read on.

Knowing math has afforded me countless advantages in life which would be too numerous to mention here. Aside from feeling more adequate in everything I do, math gives me the edge when it comes to problem solving, strategizing, planning, and yes even cooking! In the recipe above, the problem becomes one of scaling down the ingredients to accommodate 4 chicken breasts instead of 6. In terms of fractions, this means that you have 4/6 or 2/3 of the required chicken. To adjust the recipe so that everything stays in the same ratios, we need to take 2/3 of the other ingredients. Ah, fractions those devils!

No big deal. To adjust the other ingredients we have to multiply 2/3 by the 1 Tbsp. of both the Extra Spicy Seasoning Blend and the lite soy sauce. That's easy. The adjustment produces 2/3 Tbsp. of both, or a tad less than the full Tbsp. But what to do with the 2/3 cup of oriental plum sauce? Well we need to take 2/3 of that too, otherwise we might drown our 4 chicken breasts in plum sauce and end up with plum chicken instead of Oriental Baked Chicken. Now if you remember how to multiply fractions, this is easy. Just multiply both numerator and denominator together to get 4/9 of a cup. Since 2/3 as a decimal is about 0.66 or 66% and 4/9 is 0.44 or 44%, you need a little less than half a cup. If your cup has markers in 1/16's then you need to fill to the line just below a half cup to get the required amount of plum sauce.

So you see, knowing math does have its advantages. And if you are not actually going to use this extraordinary subject to solve some problem in nuclear physics, at least you can use it to help with some more practical problems like answering the question, "What should I make for dinner tonight?" Who knows, if you master this subject enough you might end up like Emeril.

Here's to good eating!