SCALING RECIPES
Picture this...
Christmas is fast approaching and over the last year you came across a banger recipe. You’ve made it for your roommates or kids a million times, it’s a guaranteed winner, you know everyone will love it but…
It serves 4 people and you need a lot more or less
It calls for a certain amount of one ingredient but you don’t have enough
And the recipe looks like this:
⅛ tablespoon of salt
7 tablespoons of sugar
15 ml of milk
5 g of butter
⅓ cup of flour
3 eggs*
Alright..so….⅛ multiplied by 9 is….um………...fuck
Girl, you are strong independent woman who don’t need no fractions! Here’s how I approach recipes that will make cooking for the holidays so much easier
Standardize + Convert to Metric
The above recipe has both volume and weight measurements in either imperial or metric - this makes scaling the recipe very tricky! The very first thing you want to do when adjusting a recipe is pick either volume or mass for all of your ingredients AND always, always, always for the love of god convert it to metric
Volume vs. Mass
“Hey Vicki, how do I convert cups to grams?”
“....you don’t”
That was a real question I was asked by someone who worked in food service for a very long time - so don’t worry if you’ve ever wondered that too!
Volume (measured with ml, cups or table/teaspoons) is how much space an ingredient takes up while Mass (grams, kilos, ounces or pounds) is how much matter it contains.
In simpler terms: Would a cup of feathers weigh the same as a cup of bowling balls?
Obviously not, because bowling balls have more matter than feathers, even when they take up the same amount of space.
MILLILITERS
This method is less precise but all you need a measuring cup, which most people have. One at a time, put your ingredients from your recipe into the measuring cup and jot down the ml amount for each. For oddly shaped objects, try to make them smaller and uniform for a more precise measurement
Grams
This is the best method but you need a kitchen scale. They’re pretty cheap to buy and a great investment. Similar to the volume, put a bowl on your scale and weigh each ingredient from the recipe and record the weight
So now you have a recipe that looks more like this
0.71 g tablespoon of salt
87.5 g tablespoons of sugar
15.5 g of milk
5.0 g of butter
40.0 g of flour
~150g of eggs*
*see my notes on eggs below
Up or Down
The hard part is now done and it’s just some simple math to work out the scaling. I recommend finding the amount for 1 serving to make it even easier - you just need to divide the weights by the number of people it serves to get the per person amount. Once you know how much you need for one person you can multiply it by 2, 50 or 1000 to scale your recipe.
This is also much easier to adjust on the fly - imagine you re-teach yourself how to do math with fractions, struggle through it to find the scale for 14 servings and then oops! We actually need 15...oh wait no, now it’s 11 *eye rolling emoji*
2. Adjusting Based on One Ingredient
It’s the night before the schools bake sale, all the stores are closed, you started to make your recipe and realize you have way less of one ingredient than it calls for. Do you throw up your hands and say screw the children? I mean you could, but there is a way to work this out...
Here’s an example using the recipe from above (I hope this doesn’t give you word problem flashbacks!)
Your recipe calls for 12.5 grams of butter but you only have 10 grams.
How much of the other ingredients do you need? How many people will the new recipe serve?
Here are the steps:
WHAT YOU HAVE / WHAT YOU NEED = CONVERSION RATE
Ex 10 g of butter / 12.5 grams of butter = 0.8
INGREDIENT x CONVERSION RATE = WHAT YOU NEED
Ex. 1.70 grams of salt x 0.8 = 1.36 grams of salt
Go through each ingredient and multiply it by the conversion rate to adjust the full recipe
To find out how many people it will now serve,
ORIGINAL NO. OF SERVINGS x CONVERSION RATE = ADJUSTED NO. OF SERVINGS
Ex Serves 10 people x 0.8 = Will now serve 8 people
Et Voila! You’re adjusted your recipe!
The most important step of this whole process is standardizing and converting to metric and I think this is where people usually get stuck when adjusting recipes. It’s super handy to convert the recipes you use frequently down to their per person, metric measurements to make scaling up or down a breeze.
I hope this helps you out this holiday season!
*A Note on Eggs
These can be tricky when scaling a recipe because
1. They come in set amount (ie you can’t buy ⅓ of an egg)
2. They vary quite a lot in their size because they come out of a chicken’s butt - which is a difficult thing to to standardize. (it’s cloaca technically, which is like a multipurpose butt…birds are fucking weird)
So if your recipe contains eggs here’s how I handle it
If your conversion amount has a decimal round up to the nearest egg.
So if it calls for 1.3 eggs, grab 2 eggs and crack them in a small measuring cup, check the amount (this will vary because of the aforementioned chicken butts) and then here’s how you work out what you need
WHAT YOU NEED / WHAT YOU HAVE = RATE
Ex. 1.3 eggs / 2 eggs = 0.65
RATE * TOTAL MILLILITER AMOUNT OF EGGS = ML AMOUNT YOU NEED
Ex. 0.65 * 90ml of eggs = 58.5 ml
You’ll need 58.5ml of eggs to get 1.3 eggs IF your total amount of eggs is 90ml
The total volume of eggs will vary greatly depending on the size and shape so this is why you need to get the volume or weight of the eggs first!