Scaling alteRecipes Recipes

This page is about why we do scaling in many of the recipes we put up on this website.

To scale a recipe means to make more of it or less of it while keeping all the ingredients in proportion.

For instance, if a recipe makes 4 servings and you want to make 2 servings, you can cut everything in half:

1 cup becomes ½ cup
1 lb becomes ½ lb
2 onions become 1 onion

Or if you want to make 8 servings from that same 4-serving recipe, you can double everything:

1 cup becomes 2 cups
1 lb becomes 2 lbs
2 onions become 4 onions

This website is about changing recipes. Scaling is one form of changing, but we treat a bunch of other changes as well. We make recipes bigger or smaller, but we also switch ingredients, add or subtract ingredients, and change cooking methods, for many different reasons: portion control, good health, ease, speed, economy, our own personal taste -- and combinations of those reasons.

When an ingredient list is short, it's easy for our readers to see which changes are made for scaling and which are made for another reason. Let's take as an example a recipe for simple syrup, which has a short ingredient list:

1 cup of white sugar
1 cup of water
makes 1 cup of simple syrup

Now let's say that I want to show on the website how to make only ½ cup of simple syrup. I scale the recipe back by half:

1 cup
of white sugar 		becomes ½ cup
of white sugar
1 cup
of water 		becomes ½ cup
of water

So:

½ cup of white sugar
½ cup of water
makes ½ cup of simple syrup

Or let's say I want to explain how to substitute brown sugar for white sugar in order to get the molasses touch of brown-sugar syrup instead of the crisp finish of simple syrup. Brown sugar is less sweet than white sugar, so to get the same level of sweetness, I explain, we need to use more brown sugar:

1 cup
of white sugar 		becomes 1 ½ cups
of brown sugar
1 cup
of water 		stays the same  

So:

1 ½ cups of brown sugar
1 cup of water
makes makes 1 cup of brown-sugar syrup

So far, each change table is ludicrously easy to read because each shows only one kind of change. But the recipes on the website seldom show only one change. They're case studies for how to change many different aspects of a recipe all at once. If we want to explain changing both the size and the ingredient list of a recipe at the same time, we need to make clear which change is which, and for which reason:

  scaling   white to brown  
1 cup
of white sugar 		becomes ½ cups
of white sugar 		becomes ¾ cups
of brown sugar
1 cup
of water 		becomes ½ cup
of water 		stays the same  

¾ cups of brown sugar
½ cup of water
makes ½ cup of brown-sugar syrup

Various folk beliefs about scaling circulate, but we don't subscribe to any of them. When we scale back a recipe by half, we divide every quantity by two. When we scale a recipe up by doubling, we multiply every quantity by two. No fancy maneuvers about baking powder, or salt, or beef bones. This is straight arithmetic, multiplying by 2 or 3, dividing by 2 or 3. Therefore it seems boring to present scaling as a separate change in every recipe. Instead of the 5-column table above, we present the information in three columns:

scaled white to brown  
½ cups
of white sugar 		becomes ¾ cups
of brown sugar
½ cup
of water 		stays the same  

The result is exactly the same as the five-column table:

¾ cups of brown sugar
½ cup of water
makes ½ cup of brown-sugar syrup