Convert

Type an amount, choose the units and read the answer. Switching between a volume (cups, spoons, millilitres) and a weight (grams, ounces) needs an ingredient, because a cup of flour weighs far less than a cup of honey. Pick the ingredient from the list. Volume to volume and weight to weight need no ingredient.

The cup, spoon and fluid ounce are the US sizes (a cup is about 237 ml). The weights per cup come from common baking charts, for example 120 g for a cup of plain flour and 200 g for granulated sugar. How you scoop changes a cup of flour by 10 to 20 percent, so a scale is always more accurate than a cup.

Scale a recipe

Say what the recipe makes and how much you want, then paste the ingredients, one per line. Every line that starts with a quantity is multiplied, and results come back as cooking fractions: 1.5 becomes 1 ½ and 0.333 becomes ⅓. Mixed numbers (1 1/2), fractions (3/4) and symbols (½) all work. Lines with no quantity, such as “salt to taste”, are left alone.

Questions

Should I scale the baking time too? Not in the same proportion. A bigger cake or a thicker dish usually bakes longer, a doubled batch of cookies on two trays does not. Use the recipe’s own cues, such as colour and a skewer coming out clean.

Why are eggs not whole numbers after scaling? If you scale 3 eggs by 1.5 you get 4 ½. Round to a whole egg, or beat one egg and use half of it.

Does it work with metric recipes? Yes. Quantities scale the same whatever the unit. For temperature and other conversions, see the Unit Converter.