Never doubt your chef/husband in the kitchen.
If you ask him a question about a recipe and he gives you an answer, he’s probably right.
You would think that after 18 ½ years of being married to a chef, I would have learned.
Apparently not . . .
The other day I had to make coffee cake for the staff at our daughters’ school. I LOVE the New York Style coffee cake my husband makes at work and since I had to make a large quantity, I figured I would only have to scale down the recipe a little instead of a lot. I’m all for practicing my math skills, but why go to the extra work if I don’t need to? 🙂
I wasn’t sure the best way to cook it, so I emailed my chef/husband and asked him what the size of a hotel pan was, since I don’t have a hotel pan here at home. (I probably could have googled this and done a little math, but am so glad I didn’t.)
This was his response just a minute later . . . “A hotel pan is 12”x22”x2”. The volume of the pan is 528 cubic inches. You could cook it in muffin tins. That may be the easiest. A 3” muffin tin that is 2” deep would be a volume of 14.14 cubic inches; pi x radius squared x height. A one pan batch would make about 37 muffins of that size. Hope that helps.”
Seriously?
Who knows this off the top of their head?
Someone who lives and breathes food all day long. Someone like a chef. Someone like my husband.
My chef/husband has an amazing memory and retains the majority of what he reads (which is a lot). He is also very good with numbers and somehow calculates things in his head at a very fast rate. (Wish I could say the same about myself.) So knowing that, I guess I shouldn’t really be surprised by his answer.
But then I started to wonder. 37 muffins? I wonder if that’s really correct. How can he really know that it will be exactly 37 muffins? I doubt it . . .
I gathered all my ingredients and got to work. I very carefully used our portion scoop (or what I used to call an ice cream scoop) and portioned the batter out into the muffin tins.
And guess how many the recipe made?
37!
I never should have doubted. Lesson learned.
Never doubt a chef in the kitchen!
Between emails like this and text messages like this, I can be amazed and entertained for hours! 🙂
Are all chefs like this or is it just my husband? Feel free to share in the comments below!
