Cooking Tools
Scale any recipe up or down, change the number of servings, and switch the measurements between grams and cups. It also tells you what the arithmetic does not: what scaling does to the seasoning, the pan and the time.
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Your scaled recipe appears here
Pick one of our recipes, paste your own, or type the ingredients in. Every amount updates as you change the servings.
In four steps
Pick one of ours from the list, paste an ingredient list from anywhere, or type the rows in yourself. Pasted lines land in the editor first so you can correct anything read wrongly.
Enter the number of servings the recipe was written for. It is usually printed at the top of the recipe, next to the cooking time.
Type the servings you are cooking for, or tap half, double or triple. The multiplier is shown next to the result so you can check the maths yourself.
Every amount updates as you go. Copy the list for a shopping trip, print it for the worktop, or open the full recipe and cook from the method.
The arithmetic
All of it comes down to one number, the conversion factor. Every ingredient is multiplied by the same figure, which is why a scaled recipe keeps its balance even when none of the amounts look familiar any more.
Step one
Conversion factor = servings you need / servings the recipe makes
Step two
New amount = original amount x conversion factor
A recipe for four taken to seven gives 7 divided by 4, which is a factor of 1.75. Everything then goes up by three quarters of itself. The tool shows that factor next to the result on purpose, so you can check any single amount without trusting the whole thing.
A worked example
Factor of 1.75. These are the amounts the tool above returns.
| Ingredient | For 4 | For 7 |
|---|---|---|
| Bone-in chicken thighs | 800 g | 1.4 kg |
| Roasted curry powderTaste as you go | 2 tbsp | 3½ tbsp |
| OnionRounded | 1 large | 2 large |
| Garlic | 4 cloves | 7 cloves |
| Thick coconut milk | 200 ml | 350 ml |
| SaltTaste as you go | 1 tsp | 1¾ tsp |
Read this before you cook
A converter can only multiply. Everything below is the part that multiplication cannot reach, and it is where most scaled-up dishes actually go wrong.
Heat and salinity are noticed at a concentration, not at a quantity, and a bigger pot concentrates them unevenly while it reduces. Put in about three quarters of the scaled figure, cook the dish out, then taste and finish it. Going up is easy. Coming back down means cooking a second batch of everything else.
Twice the chicken in one pan does not take twice as long, but it does take longer than the recipe says: longer to come up to temperature, longer to drive off the extra liquid, longer to brown because a crowded pan steams before it sears. Cook to the sign the method describes rather than to the clock.
Most home pans hold about half again what a four-serving recipe needs, and no more. Past that the food sits too deep, the base never gets hot enough to toast the spices, and a curry turns into a stew. Two batches in the right pan beat one batch in the wrong one.
Two and a half eggs, one and a third limes, three quarters of an onion. Whole-ingredient rounding shows these at the nearest whole one and marks them so you know it happened. Anything you weigh or spoon out is left exact, because a gram figure rounded to a whole is just a wrong gram figure.
Evaporation depends on how much surface the pan gives the liquid, and that barely changes when you double a recipe. So a scaled-up curry usually needs less added water than the multiplication suggests, and a scaled-down one dries out sooner. Hold a little back, and add it if the pot needs it.
Curries forgive a heavy hand. Cakes, hoppers and short eats do not, because raising agents work on a ratio to the flour. Weigh rather than measure by cup where you can, and remember that a scaled batter in the same tin changes the depth, which changes the bake more than the ingredients do.
Quick reference
Multiply every amount by 0.5, or divide by two. Halve the pan size with it if you can, because the same pan gives a small batch too much surface and it will dry out early.
Multiply every amount by two, then hold back on the salt and chilli and taste at the end. Expect a longer cook and a wider pan, not double the time.
Multiply by three. At this size the pan is usually the problem before the ingredients are, so check what you own holds it before you start chopping.
Divide 6 by 4 to get 1.5, then multiply every amount by that. This is the friendliest scale there is: the same pan, roughly the same timings.
Divide 10 by 4 to get 2.5. Past double, split the cooking across two pans rather than buying a bigger one, and season each pan separately.
Divide 4 by 6 to get 0.67. Small spice amounts get awkward here, so switch the tool to decimals and use a proper measuring spoon.
Yield is what the recipe makes in total: the serving count multiplied by the size of one serving. A curry serving four at about 200 g a head yields roughly 800 g, which is the figure to scale from when you are cooking to a weight rather than to a headcount.
There is no single answer, because a cup is a volume and a gram is a weight. A cup of flour is about 125 g and a cup of sugar about 200 g. The table below covers the pantry items these recipes use most.
Measurement tables
| Measure | Metric | Same as |
|---|---|---|
| 1 teaspoon | 5 ml | one third of a tablespoon |
| 1 tablespoon | 15 ml | 3 teaspoons |
| ¼ cup | 60 ml | 4 tablespoons |
| ⅓ cup | 80 ml | 5 tablespoons and 1 teaspoon |
| ½ cup | 120 ml | 8 tablespoons |
| 1 cup | 237 ml | 16 tablespoons, or 8 US fluid ounces |
| US | Metric |
|---|---|
| 1 ounce | 28 g |
| 4 ounces | 113 g |
| 8 ounces, half a pound | 227 g |
| 1 pound | 454 g |
| 2 pounds 3 ounces | 1 kg |
| Celsius | Fahrenheit |
|---|---|
| 150C | 300F, gas mark 2 |
| 160C | 325F, gas mark 3 |
| 180C | 350F, gas mark 4 |
| 190C | 375F, gas mark 5 |
| 200C | 400F, gas mark 6 |
| 220C | 425F, gas mark 7 |
A cup measures how much room something takes up. A gram measures how heavy it is. There is no single number that turns one into the other, because a cup of flour and a cup of sugar weigh nothing like the same. These are the pantry items these recipes lean on, and they are close enough for cooking rather than exact.
A cup here means the US cup, about 237 ml. Australian and many UK recipes use a 250 ml cup, so an Australian cup of anything weighs roughly five per cent more than the figures beside it. The converter above works volume to volume and weight to weight, and never guesses across the two.
| Ingredient | Weight |
|---|---|
| Plain flour | about 125 g |
| Granulated sugar | about 200 g |
| Raw long grain rice | about 185 g |
| Red lentils, masoor dhal | about 190 g |
| Desiccated coconut | about 80 g |
| Freshly grated coconut | about 85 g |
| Coconut milk | about 240 g |
Try it on a real recipe
Questions
Still stuck on a recipe? The Kitchen Assistant answers questions from the recipes on this site while you cook, and the other cooking tools are all free too.
Divide the servings you need by the servings the recipe makes, then multiply every ingredient by that number. Four servings taken to six gives 6 divided by 4, which is 1.5, so every amount goes up by half. The tool above does the arithmetic and puts the answer in whichever units you measure in.