How can I scale down a high-yield recipe that calls for a single egg?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.