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Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
5 min
29/01/2026
Understanding ingredient functions in a recipe is crucial to scaling a recipe, rather than just looking at the numeric value. While flour and sugar can be scaled linearly, the amounts of salt, baking powder, and other seasoning ingredients must be adjusted to achieve the desired result. The ratios of those ingredients to one another hold more weight than their numbers, and when scaling above a certain volume, the cooking time and equipment used will also need to be adjusted.
Scaling a recipe numerically (multiplying or dividing) appears to be simple. However, it requires a careful understanding of the interactions between the ingredients. When doubling a recipe or scaling it down by dividing it in half, you may not get the same flavour result. Many spices must be added in much smaller quantities than the numerically scaled amount of the other ingredients. Therefore, knowing which ingredients can be scaled linearly and which require moderation allows you to create reliable dishes rather than relying on guessing. The following article discusses the logic behind scaling recipes and provides rules to help you maintain flavour, texture, and consistency in your cooking, whether you are cooking for 1 or 20.
Ingredients in a recipe are connected via ratios, such as the ratio of flour to fat, of liquid to starch, or of acid to sweetness- all of which have greater significance than absolute amounts of an ingredient within a recipe. The first step in scaling a recipe is to maintain the original ingredient ratios; next, the total amount should be adjusted. Recipes written with clear ratios (soups, stews, rice dishes) can be scaled easily, while recipes for baked goods typically do not allow for easy adjustment. If a recipe does not include explicit ingredient ratios, determine the ingredient ratios (by weight or volume) before attempting to scale the recipe; consider the original recipe a guideline, not an end product.
Except salt, pepper, and vinegar, staple ingredients generally scale well. Protein, starch, vegetable, water, stock, and neutral fats typically can be multiplied or divided without changing the expected texture and flavour of the finished product (e.g., a stew with twice as many vegetables and broth would still behave like stew); however, it is important to use weight as a measuring device to ensure consistency and accuracy when scaling; measuring with volume measurement results in more errors when quantities increase or decrease due to large differences in air pockets and packing differences.
Spices, herbs, salt, sugar, acids, and heating sources often do not double in the same way. Doubling chillies can overwhelm the dish, rather than enhancing its flavour. It’s safer to allow an incremental increase of 50-70 per cent in these flavourings for a double batch, and to adjust down as necessary. Fresh herbs will behave differently from dried herbs, and the flavour of a dish becomes more intense with longer cooking times. Always under-season the dish at first; it is easier to add seasoning than to attempt to fix an over-seasoned dish.
Baking is the most precise form of cooking and requires extreme attention to detail in every step of the recipe. The leavening agents (yeast, baking powder, and baking soda) need to be handled with caution; too much leavening can lead to collapse or an undesirable texture in the finished product. When scaling a recipe that contains cakes or breads, the leavening agents should be increased slightly, not in proportion to the other ingredients.
Fats and sugars contribute to a cake’s tenderness and moisture and affect the texture of a baked good more than the flavour. For instance, it is necessary to be very careful about fractional eggs when scaling up from a single egg, and to accurately round up or down when dividing to obtain the appropriate structure and richness.
Remember, when you scale the ingredients, you do not scale the physics of the product being baked. Larger quantities of batter or dough take longer to heat evenly; they cool more slowly during baking, and they may require larger pans to prevent them from steaming rather than browning. Smaller quantities, on the other hand, may cook faster than expected due to their increased surface area when compared to the greater depth of larger quantities. If you crowd a pan with products or transfer them to a smaller pan without adjusting your cooking time or, in some cases, temperature, you may end up with an undesirable outcome that has nothing to do with the ingredient ratio.
Ingredients can be classified into four distinct categories: bulk ingredients, which allow for precise scaling; flavour, which requires careful consideration; structure, which must be scaled according to math; and finishing components (garnish, herbs, etc.), which should always be adjusted to taste. It is also important to test seasoning throughout the cooking process. When baking, always recalculate based on weight and refer to other recipes with similar sizes to help you scale properly. Rather than viewing scaling as simply a multiplication method, treat it as a completely new culinary interpretation, but within the same structure of culinary principles.
