polka wrote:Hello All
I am having a bit of difficulty getting my mind around some of the formulas. I was trained as a chef, and baker a long time ago, and treating the whole sausage project as 100% seems odd.
I expected a formula to be something like:
meat = 100%
all other ingredients would be a % of the total meat weight.
As others have said, this is pretty much the standard approach to formulation. It isn't that a percentage of final product is odd, just less useful in some circumstances. % of FP requires more intermediate calculations in scaling a formula.
wheels wrote:There is no advantage using % of total sausage - % of meat weight is far better - just like bakers' percentages are when making bread. You can then scale it for any amount of meat easily...I would encourage people to weigh and post in gms - including liquids (traditionally weighed for accuracy when sausage making) as a percent of the total meat weight.
I developed a spreadsheet for analyzing old recipes and formulating new ones, and have it calculate both percentages of meat block and final product. If I have a customer who wants 20 lbs of sausage, having the spreadsheet scale by % of final product comes in handy. The base formulation is still % of meat block, though. And yes, once I switched over to metric weights from American weights and volume measures, I never looked back. SO much easier! For scaling liquids, especially to large quantities, liquid weight is the only way to go.
An easy way to convert formulas written as a % of final product is to multiply the percentages by 100 and call those grams (so 1% = .01, x100 = 1, so 1 gram), Take those weights for everything and recalculate the percentages as percentage of meat block, which you understand.