The CousCous Equation
You must have seen a movie or read a book or something where a computer or robot or something is brought to its knees by a seemingly simple logic puzzle or something.
Last night that happened to me. Making couscous.
You have to be a bit careful making couscous. It’s all to easy to end up with something that’s just all glug and no crunch, or all too crunchy and inedible. Or too oily and yucky. For something so simple there are quite a few potential pitfalls. So it really pays to follow the instructions on the packet, as they really should know the exact quantities of stuff to get perfect results.
The packet instructions: “Allow approximately 45g of couscous per 80g cooked serving. Place 250g of couscous in a large bowl with 400ml of boiling and 1tbsp oil”…
Ok, so there were 2 of us, so we needed to have 90g of couscous, so that means we need, um some water, so half what they’re saying is, um, 200ml but that’s for 125g which is still too much for just 2 of us, so we need a bit less, so that’s um, oh I give up!!! My brain’s overheating! Where’s the spreadsheet?!
Why don’t they just give instructions with a nice figure for each serving?! It would stop my head exploding anyway!
But for the record, after a lot of head scratching, the final result was probably some of the best couscous that we’ve ever made, doing us proud for dinner and lunch today.
I ended up using 300ml of water. I’ll leave it to you to work out how much cous cous that was!