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Jambalaya For 100? No Problem.

David Reber
/
Flickr
Cooking huge quantities of jambalaya is more complicated than it looks. Jay Grush crowdsourced and created the Jambalaya Calculator to help cooks scale up jambalaya recipes up to 25 gallons.

A good cook can spend years getting the flavor and seasoning in a single pot of jambalaya just right.

But when there are lots of portions to serve — like a tailgate party or big family gathering — scaling up a classic and complicated recipe like jambalaya can get tricky.

That’s where Jay Grush comes in. Grush goes by the name “StadiumRat” on an LSU sports message board called tigerdroppings.com. A few years ago, he started a dialogue with other food aficionados on the site’s Food and Drink discussion board.

“Of course, LSU is famous for their tailgating,” says Grush. “People would ask questions about how to cook a large pot of jambalaya and I was always wanting to learn how to cook one, too. So I started keeping notes for myself.”

He asked a lot of questions and got feedback from his friends on the board about the specifics of ingredients and measurements and technique. He says all of the cooking advice he was receiving had a common theme.

“I realized this is all ratios, and that’s what a spreadsheet is about. You can do calculations from one cell to another, based on a ratio.”

Grush entered the proper ratios from his notes into an Excel spreadsheet, and called it the Jambalaya Calculator.  

It turns out, cooking the perfect pot of Jambalaya for a large group is not as easy as doubling or tripling the recipe to feed more people.  For one, most people decide how much jambalaya they’re cooking by the size of the pot they have.  

“People would say, ‘OK, I’ve got a five gallon pot, give me a recipe for that,” Grush says.  

He decided the spreadsheet should be calibrated to measure volume very accurately, so people would know how much they could fit in a particular pot.

Grush also found out jambalaya is different from other dishes because the rice expands. In most other recipes, everything shrinks.

“Something I didn’t know going in that I found out from the experts on the board, is that the bigger your pot of jambalaya, the less ratio of liquid to rice,” he says. “I think that’s because as you increase the size of a pot, the surface area doesn’t increase at the same rate. You need to reduce the liquid if your pot of jambalaya is going to come out correctly.”

“So, it’s technical!” Grush says with a laugh. “But it’s not like multiplying a recipe. It won’t work if you just multiply a jambalaya recipe, when you get into the bigger volumes.”

Download the calculator here.

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