Free recipe scaler
Scale any recipe up or down by servings. Enter your ingredients, set the base and target servings, and get instant scaled amounts. Nothing is saved. It all stays in your browser.
How the arithmetic works
The factor is target servings divided by base servings. Every amount is multiplied by it. A recipe for 4 taken to 10 servings: 10 divided by 4 is 2.5. So 500 g of flour becomes 1,250 g, 200 g of sugar becomes 500 g, and 3 eggs become 7.5. That is where the arithmetic stops and the kitchen starts. Seven or eight is your call.
The calculator above does that step for every row at once. It saves nothing and needs no account. Close the tab and the list is gone.
What does not scale in a straight line
The factor applies to amounts. It does not apply to the rest of the kitchen, and that is the part no spreadsheet works out for you.
- Salt and assertive spices
Adjusted to taste in the original recipe, not calculated. Multiply them by the factor anyway, like every other amount, and taste early enough to correct the seasoning.
- Baking powder and soda
Leavening reacts to the mass of batter and the shape of the tin, not to the serving count. One deep cake rises differently from two shallow ones made from the same doubled batter.
- Cooking and baking time
Twice the stew sits higher in the pot and takes longer than one batch. Go by core temperature and by how it looks, not by the clock.
- Pan, pot, tray
Double the quantity in the same pan steams instead of browning. If the surface area does not grow with the recipe, the result changes however exact your amounts are.
- Reduction and evaporation
A sauce evaporates through its surface, not its volume. Double it in the same pot and it takes longer to reduce; a wider one is quicker.
What does scale cleanly is anything that is pure quantity: flour, sugar, butter, stock, meat, vegetables.
Why cooking time depends on geometry rather than the amount, and what to check before cooking and note on the recipe card: Scaling recipes: why doubling is not just multiplication
Where a spreadsheet gives up
While a recipe is a list, the calculator above is enough. It gets awkward once a recipe stands on other recipes. A plate with its own sauce, its own stock and its own spice mix is four recipes.
Then you change supplier. One ingredient moves in a sub-recipe that sits inside eleven dishes. In a spreadsheet you go looking for eleven places and miss one. That is what we are building Trolevo for: sub-recipes stay attached to the dish, food cost is recalculated, and the EU-14 allergen label is rebuilt for every affected dish.