Serving It Up

As we approach the Super Bowl on Sunday, I have been searching the internet trying to figure out what dip or other concoction I may attempt to make before the game. I don't know what it is about the Super Bowl which makes me want to try something new because I'm normally not the kind of person who usually needs a lot of snacks to watch football (and this year I don't have any rooting interest in the game), but for the last couple of days I have been searching high and low for a new snack recipe to attempt in its honor. I was thinking homemade Twinkies, but after trying a few imitations I have decided to leave that up to the professionals. Now, whenever you tell experienced chefs about a new recipe they always tell you how it should be treated as nothing more than a guideline and that you should feel free to add or subtract as you see fit. I disagree. The way I figure it the people handing out these recipes have put a lot of time and effort into crafting them and used a lot of trial and error to make sure everything is exactly as it should be. To start messing with it on your first try is rather disrespectful. That is why I pretty much stick to the script (unless it has to do with onions, because screw those terrible bastards). In fact, there is only one area where I tend to completely disagree with the recipes as they are written down - serving sizes.

Whenever I make a new dish for the first time I never fail to be surprised at how many people they expect it to feed... and not in a good way. I have never looked at a bowl and thought, "How are 2-4 people supposed to eat all this?" Instead I find myself wondering if I made enough for 2. Of course, the experience bakers among us are thinking, "Simply double the ingredients and make twice as much." You could do that, but then you have to wonder how that will alter baking time. Every change, especially when it is an unfamiliar recipe, could just as easily wreck the dish as improve it. Of course, these types of deviations wouldn't be necessary if we would just come up with a definitive measurement for what counts as a serving. (I'm sure it is out there, but it's probably on the metric system, making it useless.) Making matters more complicated than it should be is the fact that some of these food companies appear just as confused as the rest of us civilians. Have you ever bought an individual package of a food and it tells you it contains two servings? How, exactly, does that work?

I have always wondered if there is a mathematical formula to calculate serving sizes, or if it just another one of those things which started out as an informal guide (the baker's grandmother used to make it and it fed all her kids, but no one remembers if they were healthy eaters or not) and somewhere along the way a random package maker decided to put it on the side of the box, inadvertently making it law. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle, in which a marketing person looked and told these snack companies that they couldn't tell consumers the exact calories in each snack because then healthy people wouldn't eat them so instead they figured out what number didn't look as bad when in the context of a 'serving size' and then finagled the number for how many serving sizes are in a package. Sure, when you add it all together it is as bad as ever, but who does math in the middle of dinner? (I have done the math before and if you hear your spoon scraping the bottom of a package believe me when I tell you a calculator is not your friend at that moment.) I can only assume at some point it became a regulation that these companies must list this information on their packaging, because I am sure a vast majority of fast-food makers would rather not let their customers have access to those numbers.

I'm sure I am hyper-aware of this simply because I spent most of my life discovering the majority of the world is not Rakauskas-grade. When the phrase "One size fits all" doesn't apply to your massive head, assuming the rest of the world shouldn't conform to a set of guidelines we had no say in compiling is a pretty easy leap to make. Unfortunately, since I don't see that changing any time soon, this is just another one of those things were we have to take it on a case-by-case basis. You just have to try recipes and hope the person who wrote it out was a healthy specimen and not some 85 lb waif who thinks two crackers is filling. The good news for those of us who would rather not think about this kind of stuff is that Super Bowl Sunday has become another one of those holidays, like the 4th of July or Thanksgiving (please note - all American-only events), where you are obligated to pig out and not think too much about it. If you have a lot of leftovers than you know you made too much. Unless, of course, you decided to play around with the recipe as you were making it, in which case it may just be awful and no one has the heart to tell you.