How to scale a recipe
- Paste the ingredient list, one ingredient per line, with the amount at the start: 1 1/2 cups flour, 250 g butter, ½ tsp salt.
- Enter how many the recipe serves and how many you want to serve, or choose Multiply by to double, triple or halve it.
- Copy or download the scaled list. Cups and spoons come out as kitchen fractions, grams and millilitres as rounded numbers.
Tips for scaling recipes
Most dishes scale well: stews, soups, sauces, salads and marinades. Baking is less forgiving, because the chemistry depends on ratios and on the size of the tin. When scaling a cake, keep the batter at the same depth by choosing a tin whose area changes by the same factor. A round 20 cm tin has about 314 cm², so a doubled recipe needs about 628 cm²: a 28 cm round tin (about 616 cm²) is close.
A few ingredients need a lighter touch:
- Salt, spices and chilli. Strong flavours can become too strong. Add about three quarters of the scaled amount, taste, then add the rest.
- Big changes in baking. Leavening and baking times don’t always scale evenly, so for more than double or less than half, a recipe written for that size is safer.
- Liquid for reducing. A larger pot evaporates at a different rate, so watch sauces and adjust.
Converting units
The scaler keeps your units so the list matches your measuring tools. To change cups to millilitres or ounces to grams, use the volume converter or the weight converter. For oven settings in another scale, see the oven temperature converter.