Recipe Scaler: Resize Any Recipe for More or Fewer People

Most recipes are written for four or six, and dinner is rarely for exactly that many. Paste the ingredient list, tell the scaler how many the recipe serves and how many you are feeding, and every quantity is resized for you: grams to the nearest sensible weight, spoons and cups to fractions you can actually measure. The ingredients scale in a straight line; the cooking time does not. A doubled stew in a bigger pan takes only a little longer, but a doubled cake mix in a deeper tin can take far longer, so read the notes under your result before the oven goes on.

How the scaler rounds each amount

Exact arithmetic gives silly numbers: 225g of flour for six instead of four is 337.5g, and 1½ teaspoons becomes 2.25. Nobody needs that precision, so the scaler rounds each line to a measure you can weigh or spoon:

• Kilograms and litres: to two decimal places, switching to grams or millilitres when the amount drops below 1kg or 1 litre.
• Grams and millilitres: to the nearest tenth of a gram below half a gram, the nearest half gram under 10g (useful for yeast and salt), the nearest gram up to 100g, the nearest 5g up to 1kg, and the nearest 10g above that.
• Teaspoons and tablespoons: to halves, quarters or eighths, the sizes found in a standard set of measuring spoons. Anything too small to round to an eighth is shown as a pinch.
• Cups: to halves, thirds or quarters, matching American cup sets. Anything under a quarter cup is shown in tablespoons (16 to the US cup). If you would rather weigh, run the result through our cups to grams converter.
• Ounces and pounds: to halves or quarters, then to one decimal place (two below 1oz) if no simple fraction is close.
• Things you count (eggs, onions, lemons, tins): to the nearest quarter, with a note when the answer is not a whole number so you can decide how to round it.

What does not scale in a straight line

Eggs

You cannot crack half an egg, but you can beat one and weigh it. Beat the eggs together, weigh the bowl, and use the share the recipe needs. For small adjustments, swapping between medium and large eggs is often enough to close the gap.

Tins and packs

When a recipe asks for 1¼ tins of tomatoes, use one tin and a splash of passata, or open two and freeze the rest. The scaler shows the exact figure; it is your call how to round it.

Salt, spices and chilli

These are the ingredients most worth tasting as you go when you multiply a recipe by a lot. Start with the scaled amount for anything the dish depends on, such as salt in bread, but hold back a little of the chilli and seasoning in a large pot and adjust at the end.

Cooking times and tins

The time depends on how deep the food sits, not how much of it there is. A double batch of stew spread across a wider casserole needs only a little longer; the same mix piled twice as deep in the same pot will need much more. For cakes, the safe route is to keep the depth of mix the same and change the tin size, which our cake tin conversion calculator works out for you. For a bigger roast, time it by weight with the roasting time calculator.

Pans and ovens

A doubled recipe needs a pan that can hold it. Crowding a frying pan or roasting tin steams food instead of browning it, so cook in batches or use two tins on separate shelves, swapping them halfway if your oven browns unevenly. On a range cooker with two main ovens, a big batch is often easier split between them.

Scaling a recipe by hand

If you would rather do it on paper, divide the number you are feeding by the number the recipe serves to get the multiplier: six people from a recipe for four is 6 ÷ 4 = 1.5. Multiply every quantity by that number, then round to something you can measure. To halve a recipe the multiplier is 0.5; for a recipe for six cut down to two it is 2 ÷ 6, or one third.