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Recipes for muffins and the like often involve eggs and the recipes are usually designed for a yield of about 20. I have a small oven and only want/can make about 5 muffins at a time. What do I do with recipes that have a yield of 20 or 10 muffins, but requires a single egg? Should I beat the egg in a bowl and use a proportional amount, or are there any special rules to be aware of?

Jack M
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    Exactly what you propose : http://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/1610/67 – Joe Jan 15 '15 at 17:07
  • @Joe Whoops. Maybe this should be closed as duplicate? – Jack M Jan 15 '15 at 18:59
  • Eh, I think it could go either way. The other question specifically says "half". – Jolenealaska Jan 15 '15 at 23:36
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    @Joe also, there are other possible answers for this question: you could ditch the egg altogether and substitute oil and water, applesauce, etc. – Dan C Jan 16 '15 at 16:21
  • @DanC : I know, that'd why I didn't flag it as a duplicate ... unfortunately, other people have. If I see it get closed, I'll start the re-open attempt. – Joe Jan 16 '15 at 16:45

1 Answers1

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An alternative that wasn't presented in the link above would be to mix the white and yolk together and measure the appropriate amount of egg by volume. A large egg consists of about 2 - 2 1/4 Tbsp. white and about 1 Tbsp. yolk. The whole egg, mixed, would total about 3 1/4 Tbsp. (which would be 3 Tbsp. + a little less than 1 tsp. - or just about 10 tsp.).

So for a half egg, you would use 5 tsp. and for a quarter egg, you would use 2 1/2 tsp. If you are cutting a recipe to 1/3 or 2/3, I would recommend just going for 3 tsp. or 6 tsp. respectively.

Aside from scaling down the volume of the whole egg in your recipe, the next best idea from the link above is probably the recommendation to go by weight (if you have an accurate food scale).

Also worth noting: Whenever you scale-up or scale-down recipes where ingredients are not specified by weight (recipes that use, say, cups of flour and sugar), the recipe might not turn out quite the same as it would have if you had made a full recipe. Recipes that don't specify weights are typically not very robust. If you're going to scale-down, you'll probably have better luck with a half-recipe than you would with a quarter-recipe.

Stephen Eure
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