Recipe Scaler

Free Tool

To scale a recipe, multiply every ingredient by the ratio of the servings you need to the servings the recipe makes — cooking 6 portions from a recipe that serves 4 means multiplying everything by 1.5. The fiddly part is the arithmetic: 1½ cups becomes 2¼ cups, ranges scale at both ends, and 2.7 eggs needs rounding to something you can actually crack. Paste your ingredient list below, set the servings, and get a clean scaled list with kitchen-sensible rounding — free, no signup required.

Paste your ingredient list (one ingredient per line)

Recipe serves

I need to serve

Scale it, then shop it

Turn any recipe into a shopping list with Prep and Chef.

What Scales Cleanly — and What Doesn't

Straight multiplication works perfectly for most savory cooking: soups, stews, salads, pasta dishes, and sauces all scale linearly with very little drama. Double the chili recipe and you need double the beans, double the beef, double the tomatoes. The scaler above handles exactly that math — including fractions, ranges like “2-3 cups,” and unitless counts like “2 eggs.”

A few categories deserve more caution. Read the notes below before you triple anything.

Baking is chemistry — scale carefully

Baking recipes are balanced chemical formulas. Flour, liquid, fat, sugar, and leavening interact by ratio, so doubling usually works — but leavening agents (baking soda, baking powder, yeast) often need slightly less than a straight multiple when you scale far up, and eggs are a chunky unit you can't cleanly multiply by 1.5. For big scaling jobs, bakers switch to weight-based measurements: grams scale exactly, cups don't. Our cooking converter turns cups into grams for 50+ ingredients.

Season to taste, not to multiplier

Salt, chili, garlic, and strong spices do not scale linearly with the rest of a recipe. Doubling a soup and blindly doubling the cayenne is the classic way to ruin dinner — aromatic intensity compounds, and evaporation behaves differently in a fuller pot. A reliable rule: scale seasonings to about 75% of the multiplier, taste, and adjust upward. Anything marked “to taste” passes through the scaler unchanged for exactly this reason.

Pan size and cook time change too

Scaling the ingredients does not scale the cookware. A doubled cake batter in the same 8-inch pan won't bake through before the edges dry out; a halved casserole in a full-size dish spreads thin and overcooks. As a rule of thumb, doubling a recipe means stepping up one pan size (or using two pans), and cook times grow far less than 2× — start checking at the original time and judge by temperature and appearance, not the clock. For roasts and baked proteins, verify doneness with a thermometer against our safe internal temperature chart.