yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Ratios for recipes


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

So right over here we have the recipe for super cake, which you want to make for your guests that are coming over for dinner tonight. But this recipe right over here, this is for 32 people. This would serve 32 folks. But you only have 16 guests coming over. So if you only have 16 guests coming over, what should be your ingredients here? How much of each of these ingredients should you have? And I encourage you to pause the video and think about it.

All right, so right now we're gonna think about—well, we're going to have a slightly smaller super cake. You might have reasoned that, look, if we're going to have half as many guests, then each of the ingredients we should just have half as much, and you would be right. Instead of eight eggs for a smaller super cake, you could have four eggs. Instead of six cups of flour in our smaller super cake, you could have three cups of flour. Instead of six cups of sugar, you could have three cups of sugar. I'm just taking half of each of these numbers. Instead of two cups of butter, you could have one cup of butter. Instead of six teaspoons of baking soda, you could have three teaspoons of baking soda. And last but not least, instead of two cups of water, you could have one cup of water.

Now this will work, and this is actually how you should adjust recipes. But there's something interesting about what's similar about these two recipes: the recipe for the main super cake that feeds 32 people and the recipe for the smaller super cake, and that's the notion of ratios. The ratios between ingredients, or the ratio of how much of an ingredient you need for a given guest.

So for example, you can see here that for every eight eggs, you have six cups of flour. So let me write this down: for every eight eggs, we have six cups of flour. We have six cups of flour, which can be expressed as a ratio. The ratio of eggs to flour is 8 to 6, which is once again interpreted as, for every 8 eggs, I have 6 cups of flour. If I said for every 6 cups of flour, I have 8 eggs, I would have written 6 to 8. So the order here matters. But here I'm saying the ratio of eggs to flour, of eggs to cups of flour, is eight to six. For every eight eggs, I have six cups of flour.

Well, what about for the smaller cake? Well here, for every four eggs, we have three cups of flour. We have three cups of flour. So what would this ratio be? Well, for every four eggs, we have three cups of flour. So the ratio of eggs to flour is four to three. Now, it turns out that these are the exact same ratio. If you have eight eggs for every six cups of flour, or for every eight eggs you have six cups of flour, that's the same thing as for every four eggs you have three cups of flour. What you're just doing is taking each of these numbers and you are dividing it by two.

So you could say the ratio in either case, the ratio of eggs to flour—let me write this down. The ratio of eggs to two cups of flour—let me write it: two cups of flour, in either case is four eggs for every three cups of flour. This is going to be true for either recipe. You have the same ratio. If you have eight eggs here, for every four eggs, you have three cups of flour. Well, that means you're going to have six cups of flour.

And so this is why ratios are helpful. This recipe has a different number of eggs, a different number of cups of flour, and a different number of cups of sugar. But the ratios between the ingredients are the same, and so you will be able to have a cake that tastes the same, that essentially is the same cake, but just is a different size.

More Articles

View All
Top E3 Rumors You MISSED -- Wackygamer
Today we are going to be giving you the 411 on some things that are going down for the E3 conference. A new Dr. Mario game is going to be announced at E3. I know you, as Dr. Mario, are actually working at a free clinic for the members of Jersey Shore. Yea…
Orbital motion | Physics | Khan Academy
If a satellite has just the right velocity, then we can make sure that the force of gravity will always stay perpendicular to that velocity vector. In that case, the satellite will go in a perfect circular orbit, because the gravitational force will act l…
Charlie Munger Commencement Address - USC
Well, no doubt many of you are wondering why the speaker is so old. Well, the answer is obvious: he hasn’t died yet. And why was the speaker chosen? Well, I don’t know that either. I like to think that the development department had nothing to do with it.…
Lecture 13 - How to be a Great Founder (Reid Hoffman)
Thank you, Sam. So, when I look through the syllabus of this class and thought about what I could possibly add that would be useful in addition to the very skills, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about has been how do you think about yourself as…
How To Get Rich According to Naval Ravikant
There are a million ways to make a million dollars, and this is the sound of all. Ravi Khan does it. For those of you who don’t know, Naval Ravikant is a philosopher and entrepreneur whose insights on happiness, wealth creation, and personal growth have g…
The One Ring Explained
These books are all about this ring. How it’s found and [spoiler alert] how it’s destroyed. While Tolkien built the largest and most consistent fictional universe, he sure didn’t mind being vague at times. So, if you finished the story and then thought: w…