From following this topic, you seem just a little bit defensive, so I will preface this by saying that I am offering this purely as constructive feedback - I don't know you nor have I tasted what I am sure are your fantastic hot sauces, and I encourage you to continue making sauce to whatever ends you desire, be it hobby or pro or something in between. Also, I disagree with the poster who stirred the pot by saying, "people haven't even tasted it and are
attacking you" – I didn’t see anyone “attacking” you, but it looked like that comment really put you on the defensive. The forums could use less of that. What I saw were people giving advice in various tones. It's your choice to take advice or leave it, just like the advice I'm about to offer. You can thank me or tell me to go pound sand. Either way I bear you no ill will – just one sauce-maker offering some friendly advice to another.
That said, it sounds like you're making the quoted part a bit harder than it needs to be. Scaling a recipe is both easy & difficult, which I'll explain. The part you're describing should be fairly straightforward, but the methodology you describe will fail.
They say cooking is not an exact science, and I'm also that kind of cook - a pinch of this and a dash of that. Sauce-making can be the same for a hobbyist - but sauce-making for a commercial application is different. Capturing the ingredient weights for a recipe actually
is an exact science. If your intention is to scale 1 gallon to 100 gallons, you
must have the 1 gallon absolutely spot on.
Gram weight is the easiest method as it's consistent across wet & dry ingredients and is easy to calculate. But this doesn't mean "weigh a medium onion and if you use 3 med onions it's 3 X the weight of that one onion". The reason for this is that liquid is the heaviest thing you're dealing with, and in produce the liquid content varies wildly - two "med onions" can be dramatically different in weight if one’s a few days older than the other, for example. To replicate a successful recipe, you must know the exact weight of the contents, broken down to individual components. This means weighing the entire component. So in the onion example, you’d take those 3 onions, peel and prep them, and weigh the parts that are going into your sauce in gram weight. Likewise with the peppers, vinegar, salt, sugar, each individual fruit, etc. If you do something to the peppers (smoke or roast) then you want the post-smoked or post-grilled weight of the total amount going into your sauce. The reason for this is that they will lose water weight in the smoking/roasting process.
The reason this is so important is because when you go from 1 gallon to 100 gallons, variances become exponentially more impactful. Using your method, maybe there’s only a slight variance of a few oz between the “guestimate” weight of 3 onions VS the actual weight of 3 onions in the 1 gallon. Going to 100 gallons, now you’re looking at 300 onions, and that small variance will become a matter of many lbs, which will make consistency impossible batch to batch.
That’s the easy part of scaling. The difficult part is the food science – ingredients that don’t scale equally. Salt is especially problematic. You don’t want your sauce’s main flavor profile to resemble a salt lick. If you have say, 250 gm of salt in a gallon (just a hypothetical example) that does not mean you’ll want 25000 gm of salt in 100 gal.
During my test batch processes, the production chef started off with 50% of the salt in my original recipes – and we superheated the sauce, I tasted a tiny bit that we'd cooled in a ramekin, then added another lb of salt, cooled in a ramekin & tasted, added another lb of salt, etc. When all was said & done, I was good with just 60-65% of the salt in my original 1 gallon recipes (plus or minus, as I did this process with each of the 3 products). For you it will be different to your tastes, and for each recipe it will be different. There are other ingredients that don’t scale equally as well, vinegars that will have to be diluted (since with 100 gal recipe you’ll be using industrial strength vinegar, not 5%), fruits that taste great in 1 gallon but overpower in 100 gallons, etc, etc, etc.
All food for thought when scaling – but provided you’ve measured all of your ingredients in gm prior to pasteurizing your sauce, you should be able to scale it out.
Another advantage of using gm weight is the ability to easily “tweak” a recipe to your taste. If I have a recipe documented in gm weight in an Excel spreadsheet, I can make it again and with slight changes to salt, sugar, fruits, veggies, garlic, etc to get it really dialed in.
I wish you luck with your enterprise, and I encourage you to engage in some trades with fellow THP-ers. Don’t assume that because this is a hot pepper community they don’t like mild sauces as well. The best review one of my sauces has ever received is the very mild Green Label review that JayT did here, and he’s a “house reviewer” for THP. I’d say the majority of our members are into the whole spectrum of hot sauces. Doing trades is great for you because you get both the brutally honest feedback from people who know hot sauce more intimately than most, and also you'll get to taste other people’s creations (one of my favorite parts of being a THP member).
Best,
Scott Z
LDHS
