Paste your ingredients, tell me the original yield and the yield you want, and I'll scale every quantity for you — fractions and all. No more math at the counter with floury hands.
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I send out the recipes I'm actually making each week — kimchi, sourdough, Nigerian dishes for my daughter. Come cook with me.
Some nights I'm cooking for my kids and a recipe makes way too much. Other times I want to double a batch because I'd rather have leftovers than cook twice. Either way, the math of scaling a recipe always seemed to take longer than the cooking. That's why I built this recipe scaler: you tell it how many servings the recipe makes and how many you want, and it adjusts every ingredient for you. No scribbling fractions on the back of an envelope.
But I'll be honest with you, scaling a recipe isn't quite as simple as multiplying everything by two. Most of it scales cleanly, but a few things don't, and knowing the difference is what keeps your doubled batch from coming out wrong.
The core ingredients, your flour, sugar, butter, broth, meat, vegetables, all scale linearly. If you're doubling, you multiply by two. If you're halving, you divide by two. Want one and a half times a recipe? Multiply by 1.5. The scaler handles all of this instantly so you're not stuck doing long division while your pan heats up.
For most savory cooking, you can scale the main ingredients freely and adjust to taste at the end. It's baking and seasoning where you want to slow down.
Halving "3/4 cup" gives you "3/8 cup," which is a measurement nobody owns a cup for. This is where a converter friend comes in handy. The cleanest move is to translate awkward fractions into tablespoons and teaspoons, since those are units you actually have. For example, 3/8 cup is 6 tablespoons. Half an egg sounds impossible, but you can crack and whisk an egg, then use half of it by volume (a whole large egg is about 3 tablespoons beaten, so half is a tablespoon and a half).
When I'm scaling something down for a smaller batch, getting those fractions into spoons is what makes it doable. The scaler does the dividing, and then you just measure in the units that exist in your drawer.
This is the part I wish someone had told me sooner. A few things stubbornly refuse to double along with everything else:
Yes, and this is the one people forget. If you double a cake but pour it into the same pan, you'll get a raw middle and burnt edges. The batter is too deep to cook through. When you scale up, you generally want a bigger pan or more pans so the depth of the food stays about the same. A good rule: keep the thickness of the batter or roast similar to the original, and the bake time stays closer to the original too.
When you switch pan sizes, watch the food instead of the clock. A deeper bake needs more time and often a slightly lower oven temperature so the outside doesn't overcook before the center sets. Use the toothpick test, the wobble test, a thermometer, whatever the recipe relies on, rather than trusting that double the batter means double the time.
Cooking for a single mom household means I'm constantly resizing recipes. Halving a dish that serves six. Doubling a soup so there's lunch tomorrow. Stretching a recipe to feed guests after church. I plug in the original yield and my target, let it do the multiplying, and then I apply the common sense above for salt, leavening, pan size, and timing.
If you want to see the kinds of dishes I'm scaling, my sourdough and the food I cook for my family are over in my recipes. And if this saved you some mental math, I've made a handful of other free kitchen helpers. They're all in my other free tools, free to use any time, no account needed.
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