Reader question: I just bought your cookbook after reading about it in Momentum Magazine. My Le Crueset pot is 6.75 qt.so how much should I increase the ingredients? 4 times?? and the cooking time?? you only list a 5.5-6 qt pot on page 12. Thank you. ~Janet from Lima, OH
Hi Janet! Thanks for writing and your interest in Glorious One-Pot Meals.
The general rule of thumb is that you need one quart of Dutch oven for every person you plan to feed. So, the recipes are written for a 2-quart Dutch oven and feed 2 people. Generally, we’d say that a 6-quart Dutch oven would feed 6 people and you’d triple the recipe and increase the cooking time by around 20 minutes.
Because your pot is closer to 7 quarts, you could feasibly increase the recipes by 3.5 times, so that instead of 2 chicken breasts, for example, you’d use 7, and increase the cooking time by closer to 25-30 minutes.
In reality, I usually find that most people eat a little less than 1 quart of cooked food, and a 3.5-quart Dutch oven, for example, easily feeds 4-5 people. A fully-loaded 6.75-quart Dutch oven would likely feed 9 people. As my pots get larger, too, I might increase the amount of protein and use more fish, for instance, while using less rice than if I were strictly tripling the recipe. One of the great things about the Glorious One-Pot Meals cooking method is that you can make the meal the way you want to make it without compromising the finished product.
Please realize that as pots get larger than 5.5-quarts and the volume of food in the pot increases as such, it becomes even more important to ensure the oven is fully preheated to 450 F before putting the full pot in, and to follow your nose to know when the meal is ready. I use a stand-alone oven thermometer to validate my oven temperature.
Remember, too, that you can still cook a Glorious One-Pot Meals recipe for 2 in a larger-than-2-quart cast iron Dutch oven.
Happy cooking! ~Elizabeth
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