Recipe Scaler
Cooking for more (or fewer) people than the recipe is written for? Enter the original serving count and your target, then add the ingredients. Everything scales proportionally so you don't have to do the math for each one.
Scale factor: ×0.500
How to use
- Enter how many servings the original recipe makes, then your target serving count.
- Add each ingredient with its amount and unit.
- All amounts update instantly as you change the serving count.
Related tools:
A recipe designed for 4 people needs scaling up when you are cooking for 12, or down when you are cooking for 1. The math is simple - multiply each ingredient by the ratio of new servings to original servings - but doing it for 10+ ingredients while in the middle of cooking is where mistakes happen.
Enter your ingredients one by one with their amounts, the original serving size, and the target serving size. The calculator adjusts everything proportionally. One caveat: baking scaling does not always work linearly. Yeast-based recipes, spice levels, and baking times may need adjustment beyond simple multiplication - the recipe notes in any good cookbook usually flag these exceptions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does scaling work perfectly for baking recipes?
Mostly, but with caveats. Leavening agents (baking powder, baking soda, yeast) sometimes need slightly less when scaling up because the effect compounds. Spices and salt often need less than the linear amount when scaling up - taste as you go. Baking time also does not scale linearly with a larger batch.
How do I scale down a recipe that uses whole eggs?
For small scale-downs that result in fractions of an egg, whisk the whole egg and measure out the fraction by tablespoon (a whole large egg is about 3 tablespoons). For very small batches, sticking to the nearest whole-egg quantity and adjusting other ingredients slightly is usually easier.
What measurement conversions should I know for scaling?
1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. 1 cup = 16 tablespoons = 48 teaspoons = 240ml. When scaling up to larger amounts, converting to grams using a kitchen scale is more accurate than stacking tablespoon measures.