Scale any recipe,
by the right ratio.

Why scaling sounds simpler than it actually is

On paper, recipe scaling is a multiplication problem. To double a recipe, multiply every ingredient by two. To halve, divide by two. Across most of a recipe — flour, sugar, oil, eggs, vegetables — this is exactly right, and a quick mental calculation gets you there.

The places it goes wrong are predictable: salt and spice intensity scales non-linearly, cooking time scales with geometry rather than with ingredient mass, and the pan you used for the original batch may be the wrong shape for the scaled version. Each of these has its own rule of thumb, and the guides above walk through them for the four most-asked ratios.

The non-linear ingredients

Salt, spices, dried herbs, baking soda, baking powder, and yeast all violate the "multiply by your ratio" rule. The pattern is roughly: at 2× use 1.5× the seasoning; at 3× use 2×; at 4× use 2.5×. The reason is that flavour perception saturates as dish volume grows — doubling the salt in a doubled batch usually produces a result that tastes salty rather than seasoned. Leaveners and yeast scale a little more linearly than salt, but their reaction rates are temperature-and-mass-sensitive, so a doubled bread dough rises differently from a single batch.

Pan size scales by area, cooking time scales by geometry

A pan's capacity is not its diameter — it's its surface area. A 9-inch round and an 8-inch square cake pan are almost exactly the same size (63.6 in² versus 64 in²); a 9-inch round and a 9 × 13 inch rectangle are nearly half a pan apart. Doubling a recipe means doubling the AREA, not the diameter. The pan-size converter calculates this automatically.

Cooking time scales differently again. For liquids — soups, stews, sauces — time tracks roughly linearly with volume; a doubled pot takes about twice as long to reach a simmer and finish. For solid bakes — cakes, breads, casseroles — time scales by the cube root of the volume change. A doubled cake takes about 26 % longer than the original, not 100 % longer. Sheet-pan items (cookies, roasted vegetables) barely change at all — the per-piece geometry is unchanged. The cooking-time guide covers the rules in detail.

When scaling isn't the right answer

Some recipes don't scale well in either direction. Yeast bread doughs are temperature-sensitive at the dough mass; a doubled batch may over-proof before you can shape it. Hollandaise-style emulsion sauces become harder to control as the mass increases — the larger pan cools slower and the sauce is more likely to break. Delicate seafood preparations have such a narrow window between perfect and overcooked that crowding the pan with a doubled portion almost guarantees uneven cooking. In these cases, two sequential batches at the original size produces better results than one larger batch.

Where the scaler fits in

The four guides above walk through the math for the most common ratios. The live scaler handles arbitrary ratios — fractional, odd numbers, in between. Paste any recipe, set the serving counts, and every ingredient line rewrites itself with proper culinary fractions (½, ⅓, ¼, ⅙) instead of decimals. Cook Mode lets you step through the scaled recipe hands-free with timers running.