How to Adjust Recipe Portions: A Practical Guide

Your recipe serves 4 but there are 7 of you tonight? Or you’re cooking for one from a family recipe for 8? Adjusting portions is an everyday reflex in the kitchen, but it’s also a common source of mistakes.

The basic math

The principle is simple: if a recipe for 4 calls for 200 g of flour and you’re cooking for 6, just multiply by 6/4 to get 300 g. This works for most ingredients.

But in practice, reaching for the calculator for every line of a 15-ingredient list gets tedious fast. And that’s where mistakes creep in.

Common pitfalls

Awkward rounding. 2.33 eggs doesn’t exist. For small quantities, you need to round smartly: to the nearest fraction that makes sense in cooking (1/4, 1/2, 3/4). For large quantities, rounding to the nearest whole number is fine.

Ingredients that don’t divide. A vanilla pod, a bay leaf, a pinch of salt: some ingredients stay the same regardless of quantity. No need for 1.5 bay leaves.

Cooking times. Doubling the ingredients doesn’t mean doubling the cooking time. A cake twice as big doesn’t bake twice as long, though you might need to adjust slightly. Portion adjustment is about quantities, not times.

The CookFolio approach

In CookFolio, adjustment is built right into every recipe. Change the number of servings with the + and - buttons, and all ingredient quantities are recalculated automatically.

The recalculation uses cooking-friendly rounding:

• Large quantities (100 g and above) are rounded to whole numbers
• Medium quantities are rounded to the nearest half (0.5)
• Small quantities are rounded to the nearest quarter (0.25)

No calculator needed, no risk of getting one line wrong. You adjust, you read, you cook.

A habit before every meal

Before you start cooking or head to the shops, always check the number of servings. It’s a small step that saves you from ending up with too little — or far too much — on the plate.