Recipe Servings Scaler
Scale recipe quantities up or down.
Scaled recipe
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 3/4 tsp salt
- 1 1/8 cup granulated sugar
- 3 large eggs
- 1 1/2 cup milk
- 6 tbsp butter, melted
- 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
8 lines had a quantity that was scaled by ×1.5. Lines with no leading number — like "salt to taste" — are left unchanged.
How to use Recipe Servings Scaler
What this tool does
The recipe scaler takes an ingredient list and resizes every quantity in it at once. Paste your ingredients one per line, tell the tool how many servings the recipe makes now and how many you want, and it multiplies each amount by the right ratio — giving you a clean, ready-to-cook list for the new batch size.
It is built to understand the messy way real recipes are written. Quantities might be whole numbers, decimals, fractions like 3/4, mixed numbers like 1 1/2, the typographic fraction characters ½ and ¾, or ranges such as “1-2 cloves”. The scaler parses all of these, multiplies them, and renders the results back as the tidy fractions a cook expects rather than awkward decimals. It loads with a sample cake recipe already scaled so you can see it working straight away.
When you would use it
Halving and doubling are the everyday cases. A recipe serves four but you are cooking for two, or for eight; a cookie recipe makes a dozen but you need three dozen for a bake sale. Rather than working through every line with a calculator and risking an arithmetic slip, you scale the whole list in one step.
It is also handy when you are adapting a recipe to the size of your tin or pan, batch-cooking to freeze portions, or cutting a generous restaurant-style recipe down to a sensible home quantity. Anyone meal-prepping for the week, or catering for a crowd, uses this kind of scaling constantly.
How to use it
- Choose how to scale: By servings or By multiplier.
- In servings mode, enter the recipe’s original servings and the number you want. The tool shows the resulting factor. In multiplier mode, type a factor or tap a preset such as ×2 or ÷2.
- Paste your ingredient list into the box — one ingredient per line, with the quantity at the start, for example “2 cups flour”.
- The scaled list appears below instantly, with every quantity recalculated.
- Use Copy list to take the scaled recipe into your notes or a shopping app.
Tips for scaling well
Treat the scaled numbers as a precise starting point, not the whole story. When you scale up significantly, expect to need a bigger pot or tin and to adjust cooking time — a doubled cake batter is deeper and bakes longer, while a halved one bakes faster. Taste as you go with salt and spices; flavour does not always scale one-to-one, and it is easier to add more than to fix an over-seasoned dish. For ingredients that come in whole units, like eggs, round to something practical and adjust the liquid slightly if needed.
For accuracy, scaling pairs well with weighing. Convert your cup measures with the cups to grams converter first, then scale the gram figures — weights scale far more cleanly than scooped cups. The oven temperature converter helps when a scaled recipe also needs an oven setting translated, the cocktail measurement converter scales drink ratios, and the general unit converter covers other measurements. While the larger or smaller batch cooks, the countdown timer tracks the time.
Privacy
The scaler is entirely client-side. The recipe you paste is parsed and recalculated by JavaScript in your browser and never leaves your device — nothing is uploaded, logged or stored. The tool works offline once the page has loaded, and closing the tab clears everything you entered.
Frequently asked questions
What kinds of quantities can the scaler read?
Why are some scaled amounts shown as fractions instead of decimals?
Does scaling a recipe always work perfectly?
Can I scale by a multiplier instead of servings?
Is the recipe I paste kept private?
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