How it works
Scaling a recipe is not just multiplication
Multiplying by 2.5 is easy. The awkward part is what comes out the other side: two-thirds of a cup becomes 1.6666666 cups, and no one owns that measuring cup. Every scaled amount here is snapped to a fraction you can actually measure — halves, thirds, quarters and eighths — so the result is something you can cook from.
Lines the parser cannot read are kept exactly as you wrote them rather than being dropped. “Salt to taste” has no quantity to scale, and losing an ingredient from a recipe would be far worse than leaving it alone. Anything it gets wrong you can correct in the table, and the scaled column updates as you type.
Switching on convert volumes to grams uses the real density of each ingredient it recognises. A cup of flour becomes 120 g, a cup of honey 340 g — the same figures behind the cooking converter. Weighing is more reliable than measuring by volume, particularly for flour.
Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I halve a recipe?
- Paste the ingredients, set the original servings, then set the target to half that number. Every quantity is divided and rounded to a measurable fraction, so 3/4 cup becomes 3/8 rather than 0.375.
- What if it misreads one of my ingredients?
- Correct it in the table. Amount, unit and ingredient are all editable and the scaled column updates immediately. Nothing is discarded during parsing — a line it cannot read is shown unchanged so you can fix it.
- Can it convert cups to grams?
- Yes, with the convert-to-grams option. It uses the actual density of each recognised ingredient rather than assuming everything weighs the same as water, which is why a cup of flour gives 120 g and a cup of honey 340 g.
- Does scaling work for baking?
- For ingredient quantities, yes, and weighing rather than measuring by volume makes it more reliable still. Bear in mind that tin size, oven temperature and baking time do not scale linearly — a doubled cake batter in the same tin needs longer at a slightly lower temperature.
- Are the ingredient weights exact?
- They are widely used reference figures, not guarantees. Flour is the least consistent: scooping straight from the bag compacts it and can push 120 g towards 145 g. Spoon it in loosely and level it off.
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