Scaling Recipes

Let's say you have a recipe that serves 10 people, but you want to make it for 6 people instead. Do you make 4 extra portions and hope everyone's really hungry? You could... But what if you need to double, or even triple, a recipe? Or even weirder, what if a recipe serves 4 people, but you need to make it for 6? Or 14?

It doesn't matter whether you're scaling a recipe up or down — the procedure for adjusting a recipe's ingredient quantities to prepare the different number of portions, a process known as scaling a recipe, is the same.

How It Works

The first thing you need to do is calculate your conversion factor, which is just a number you're going to use to convert all the quantities. There's a tiny bit of math involved, but it's OK to use a calculator — that's what they're there for!

To find your conversion factor, just divide the desired number of servings by the original number of servings. The resulting number is your conversion factor. Here's the formula:

desired servings
————————  = conversion factor
original servings

Scaling that 10-portion recipe down to six portions involves two steps:

1. Divide 6 by 10, which gives you a conversion factor of 0.6.
2. Multiply each ingredient amount by 0.6.

Let's work through a simple example to illustrate how this works. Say your recipe calls for 2 quarts of chicken stock. All you need to do is multiply 2 quarts by your conversion factor of 0.6:

2 quarts × 0.6 = 1.2 quarts chicken stock

Great! But wait a second... What exactly is 1.2 quarts? Well, questions like that are why most of the world uses the metric system. The rest of us are going to have to convert 1.2 quarts into ounces. If we consult this handy cooking units conversion tool, we see that there are 32 ounces in a quart, so:

32 × 1.2 = 38.4 ounces

We can round that down to about 38 ounces, but that's still kind of a weird amount. It'd be more clear if it were given in cups, wouldn't it? Our conversion tool reminds us that there are 8 ounces in a cup, so:

38 ÷ 8 = 4.75

Which means 1.2 quarts is equal to approximately 4¾ cups. That's all there is to it!