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Scaling Up changing the taste

J

juseasy

Hi Everyone,
 
I was just wondering if anyone has experienced a dramatic change in taste when they scale up sauce?
 
I have a red chile, habanero sauce that I make with vinegar, water and small amount of apple cider vinegar.
After finally getting it to taste they way I wanted I decided to make a batch of 10 bottles.  I figured all I have to do is take my recipe (which is for one bottle) and multiply each ingredient by 10.  The 10 bottles have a really strong vinegar like taste, particularly the apple cider is quite strong.
 
Am I scaling up properly?
 
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Well,there are some things to keep in mind. Salt doesnt scale up like normal, oftentimes it needs to be scaled back.

Next is, are you scaling up by measuring everything by grams? It is inaccurate to measure by cups. Ingredients, including liquids should be measured by grams.

Ps...welcome from your neighbor to the south in Okanogan county, WA.
 
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It is almost impossible to scale up from a recipe for ONE bottle. That is one of your problems. It's like scaling up a matchbox car and expecting it to look like the real car. Normally you would cook a batch and taste as you cook. Not scale up from one bottle. Make a batch you are happy with. A large sauce pot's worth. THEN you would scale THAT up if you wanted more. Almost impossible from one bottle, there is just too much that can wrong because there is so little sauce and when you scale it the differences become more apparent. 
 
If the vinegar was strong that's what you need to reduce. ;)
 
Measure your pH.
 
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The Hot Pepper said:
It is almost impossible to scale up from a recipe for ONE bottle. That is one of your problems. It's like scaling up a matchbox car and expecting it to look like the real car. Normally you would cook a batch and taste as you cook. Not scale up from one bottle. Make a batch you are happy with. A large sauce pot's worth. THEN you would scale THAT up if you wanted more. Almost impossible from one bottle, there is just too much that can wrong because there is so little sauce and when you scale it the differences become more apparent. 
 
If the vinegar was strong that's what you need to reduce. ;)
 
Measure your pH.
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+1
 
Think about it like this. Let's say you used 1 tsp of garlic powder for your 1 bottle batch. But maybe the tsp wasn't exactly level and it was actually 1.1 tsp. Doesn't sound like a lot but that is a 10% difference from what you think you're using. Now you scale up to 10 bottles, you want to make sure its perfect so you're more careful with measuring and you get exactly 10 tsp where your original batch would actually require 11 tsp.
 
Also helps tremendously to measure by weight rather than volume as Salsalady mentioned.
 
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Thank you for all of your responses - so much good info!
Now I I know I was doing everything wrong
 
@salsalady  - I was measuring by cups, teaspoons, tablespoons.  I only measured the peppers by weight.
 
@The_NorthEast_ChileMan  - thank you for the links.  I need to learn how to search properly, I couldn't find anything when I tried!
 
@The Hot Pepper and @UnNatural - I never thought about how the small differences become quite significant when multiplied.  When I was making the single
                                                          bottle I would just toss in ingredients until it tasted the way I wanted.  I would make notes along the way. When it came
                                                          time for the larger batch I followed my "final notes" like they were written law! 
 
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Also, even with using a digital gram scale, there can be a teaspoon of powder difference from when it changes from 1 gram to 2 grams. So if you measure out your heaping teaspoon, and it reads 1 gram, it could actually be more like 1.8 grams.

Making a larger batch reduces those variances. Or get a super accurate digital small increment scale. I use a scale that goes up to 4 pounds to ounces to grams.
 
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