Recipe Scaler
Scale any recipe up or down — paste your ingredient list, set servings, and get exact adjusted quantities.
5 cups flour 2 cup sugar 1 cup butter, softened 4 eggs 2 tsp vanilla extract salt to taste
Works with whole numbers, decimals, fractions ("1/2"), mixed numbers ("2 1/2"), and unicode fractions ("½"). Lines without a leading quantity, like "salt to taste," are left alone.
How it works
Paste your ingredient list into the box, one item per line. Set how many servings the recipe currently makes, then set how many you actually need. The tool finds the quantity at the start of each line and scales it by the ratio between those two numbers, leaving everything else on the line untouched.
Say a cookie recipe serves 4 and you want 8. That is a 2× factor. A line that reads 2 1/2 cups flour becomes 5 cups flour. A line that reads 1/3 cup sugar tripled by a 3× factor becomes 1 cup sugar, not some ugly repeating decimal, because the tool rounds to the nearest eighth and writes the result as a fraction you can actually measure. Lines with no quantity up front, like salt to taste or fresh basil for garnish, are left exactly as you wrote them, since there is nothing sensible to scale.
The parser reads plain numbers ("2"), decimals ("2.5"), fractions ("1/2"), mixed numbers ("2 1/2"), and unicode fraction characters ("½", "¼", "1½") the way they show up when you copy a recipe from a website or a cookbook. Below 10, results are shown as a whole number plus the nearest eighth ("1/8," "1/4," "3/8," and so on); at 10 and above, one decimal place is usually easier to read than a fraction, so that is what you get.
FAQ
Why did my fraction come out slightly rounded?
Doubling 1/3 cup gives 2/3 cup exactly, but some scale factors do not land on a clean eighth. The tool rounds to the nearest 1/8 cup, teaspoon, or tablespoon because that is the finest increment most measuring sets actually have. For a factor like 2/3, expect the result to be close rather than mathematically perfect.
Does it convert units, like cups to grams?
No. The scaler only multiplies the quantity that is already there; it keeps whatever unit you typed. If you need to move between cups and grams, use the cups-to-grams converter on the ingredients you weigh instead of measure by volume.
What about baking times and pan size?
This tool only scales ingredient quantities. Baking time does not scale linearly with batch size, and doubling a cake recipe usually means a bigger pan or two pans, not double the time in the oven. Check doneness with a toothpick or thermometer rather than trusting the clock. If you are unsure how much a recipe should shift for weeknight batching versus a crowd, our batch cooking tips guide covers the judgment calls the math cannot.
Can I use a multiplier instead of servings?
Yes — set the original servings to 1 and the target servings to whatever multiplier you want (2 for double, 0.5 for half), and the factor works out the same way. This is handy when you are building a meal-prep system and want to batch a base recipe by a fixed multiple every week, or when you are portioning a big batch down for the freezer as described in our freezer-friendly meals guide.