Every recipe I write says it serves 4, but my house rarely needs exactly 4 servings. Some nights it’s just me and one kid home from practice. Other nights my in-laws show up and suddenly I’m cooking for 9. I used to do this math on a sticky note next to the stove, usually while something was already boiling over.
This tool does the math for you. Type in your ingredients at the amounts a recipe calls for, tell it how many people you’re actually feeding, and it recalculates every line for you. No more halving a recipe that calls for 3 eggs and wondering what 1.5 eggs is supposed to look like.
Add an ingredient above to see it scaled.
How to use it
Start with the two number fields at the top. Original servings is whatever the recipe says at the top of the page, usually a number like 4 or 6. New servings is how many you’re actually cooking for tonight.
Then add your ingredients one at a time. Type the amount, the unit, and the ingredient name, and hit add. The tool will show you the scaled amount right away, and you can keep adding as many ingredients as the recipe needs.
A few things worth knowing before you scale a recipe
Not every ingredient scales in a straight line. If you’re doubling a recipe, doubling the salt and baking soda usually works fine, but doubling something like cayenne pepper or a strong spice can throw the whole dish off balance. I usually add about three quarters of what the math says for anything spicy or strong, then taste and adjust from there.
Baking is a bit less forgiving than cooking. If you’re scaling up a cake or bread recipe, keep an eye on your pan size too. A recipe built for one 9 inch pan doesn’t always translate cleanly to two pans or one much bigger one, and the bake time will likely need to change even if the ingredient amounts scale perfectly.
Cook times in general don’t scale the way ingredients do. A soup recipe doubled might need a little extra simmer time since there’s more volume to heat through, but a tray of roasted vegetables spread across two sheet pans usually cooks in about the same time as one pan, since the oven temperature hasn’t changed.
Recipes to try this with
23 Vegetables That Turn Into Dinner With Just a Sheet Pan and 30 Minutes
27 Sneaky Plant-Based Foods You Can Hide in Any Kid’s Dinner