Built for cooks who
care about the details.

Why we built this

Most recipes are written for someone else's table. The cookbook assumes four servings; you're cooking for two, or twelve, or however many people actually showed up. Every cook learns to do the mental math — multiply this by 1.5, divide that by three — but the result rarely reads naturally. 0.875 cups of flour is a useless instruction. ⅞ cup is a measurable one. We built ScaleRecipe because we wanted a tool that did the math and kept the language of the recipe intact.

What "elegant" means here

Elegance, in software, is usually code for “minimalism with a thin coat of varnish.” That's not what we mean. ScaleRecipe is elegant in the older sense — it sweats details that nobody asked for, in the conviction that good kitchen tools disappear into the work. A few things we cared about:

• Proper culinary fractions. Output rounds to denominators of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, and 16 — the fractions a kitchen scale and a measuring cup actually understand.
• Smart unit promotion. Three teaspoons becomes one tablespoon. Sixteen tablespoons becomes one cup. The scaled recipe reads the way a cook would write it, not the way a calculator would.
• Pluralisation. “1 cup”, “2 cups.” “1 teaspoon”, “2 teaspoons.” Recipes that disagree with English are recipes that haven't been edited.
• Tabular numerics. The fonts on this site use tabular figures so quantities line up vertically. Small thing, big difference when the recipe is on screen and the bowl is on the counter.
• Calibrated ingredient densities. A cup of flour weighs 120 g; a cup of honey weighs 340. Forty-plus pantry staples have their own entries, drawn from King Arthur Baking and USDA references.

The philosophy

ScaleRecipe is built around three convictions about what makes a kitchen tool good.

Trust the cook.

Recipes have parts that should scale (quantities) and parts that shouldn't (judgement calls — “a pinch”, “to taste”, “until golden”). We scale the first and leave the second alone. The same is true for cooking time: we don't pretend the math has an answer when the geometry of the dish is what really determines the bake.

Show your work.

Every conversion on the site has a guide page that explains where the numbers come from and where they break down. The salt comparison isn't buried in a footnote — it's on the ingredient converterpage, because if you're converting between salt brands without reading that section, we've failed you.

Keep the cooking out of the funnel.

ScaleRecipe doesn't require an account, doesn't run first-party analytics, and doesn't store the recipes you scale on our servers — recipe text stays in your browser. We do carry advertising via Google AdSense to cover the cost of running the site; you can read exactly how that works (and how to opt out of personalised ads) on the Cookie Policy and Privacy Policypages. We don't take editorial direction from advertisers and don't run sponsored content. We're a tool, not a marketing funnel.

About TheMealDB

The recipe browser pulls live from TheMealDB, an open, community-maintained database of cooked-and-tested recipes from kitchens around the world. We're not affiliated with them — we just love what they've built and wanted to make their data easier to scale and convert. Recipe data, photos, and instructions are theirs; the scaling and conversions are ours.

The stack, briefly

ScaleRecipe is built on Next.js with the App Router, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. Type is set in Fraunces (headlines, scaled quantities) and Inter(UI, body). The scaling, parsing, and conversion logic is pure functional TypeScript with no third-party math libraries — the algorithms are short enough to read in one sitting, and we wanted them auditable. There is no database. There is no backend. The entire site is static except for the live recipe lookup.

What's next

We have a list. Better internationalisation (metric cups by default for visitors outside the US). Substitution suggestions when you're out of an ingredient. Print-styled recipe pages with optional notes. A way to save scaled recipes locally without an account. If any of those land on the site, they'll be quiet and considered, the same way the rest of the tool was built.

If you're a cook who wants to send feedback — a bug report, a missing ingredient density, a feature request — there's a link in the footer. We'll write back.