Savory Lentil Stew Recipe--Original and Scaled Up

This stew uses ingredients that you always have on hand, and it tastes incredible. The plethora of roasted onions and garlic with the spices creates a symphony of flavors that will make you want to keep eating.  Lentils are high in protein and fiber, so eat away!

Mise en place.  We used the Ninja food processor to chop the garlic and would also recommend doing the same for the onions.

Savory Lentil Stew: Original size
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¼ cup olive oil
½ teaspoon cumin
4 cloves garlic (or 0.25 ounces)
1 medium onion (or 8 ounces before chopped)
1 cup brown lentils, rinsed
3 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper.

Use a food processor or Ninja to chop the onion. Then remove the onion and process the garlic.

In a large pot, heat olive oil, then sauté onion until translucent.  Then add garlic and cumin and continue with sautéing.  When the garlic is brown, add lentils, stir, then add water. 

Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for about an hour until the lentils are mostly tender. Add salt and cayenne and cook for about 10 more minutes, or until they are the desired texture. 

Makes 4 (1 cup) servings.

Savory Lentil Stew: Party Size, Standardized

This is our standardized final recipe. As you can see, we changed the serving size to one-half cup, instead of the one-cup servings mentioned in the original recipe. When we did the tasting for our first test batch, we decided that since the stew was quite hearty, a half-cup was plenty, especially since we were not planning on handing out whole servings for our tasting. We did not want to be swimming in leftover lentils!

Our test batch actually made three cups of product, which when the new serving size was accounted for, came out to be six servings. Using the factor method, we figured out that in order to make 48 servings, we would need to multiply the recipe by a factor of 8.

We had already weighed the onions and garlic, so we just multiplied those weights by 8. We then multiplied the other quantities by 8 and used the tables in Food for Fifty to convert them to weight or volume as appropriate. The spices were converted to ounces, but when we actually made the large recipe, our scale was not sensitive enough for the fractions of ounces, so teaspoons worked out just fine.

In an ideal setting, we would have measured out how many servings the actual recipe made to make sure that it was consistent with the theory, but we were just content to know that we had enough samples to serve to our testers, and plenty of lentil leftovers for us!
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