Scaling changes how much a recipe makes without changing the recipe you saved. Cook for two from a recipe that serves six, or build the whole dish around the chicken you already have.
Scale by servings
On a recipe, use the Servings stepper. It moves in quarter servings, from ¼ up to 100. Every amount on the ingredient list changes to match.
Scale by an ingredient you have
Tap Scale by an ingredient, choose the line, and enter how much of it you have, in any unit of the same kind. Weigh 1.4 lb of chicken thighs against a recipe that asks for 600 g and the whole recipe adjusts around them, with the new number of servings shown at the top.
A weight can be entered in grams, kilograms, ounces or pounds. A liquid can be entered in milliliters, liters, teaspoons, tablespoons, cups or fluid ounces. A counted ingredient, such as eggs or cloves, is entered as a count. "To taste" lines cannot be used to scale, and never change.
Amounts you can actually measure
Scaled amounts are rounded to what a kitchen can measure.
- Imperial amounts use ⅛, ¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔ and ¾, and move between cups, tablespoons and teaspoons as the amount shrinks or grows. Ounces become pounds once there is a pound or more.
- Metric amounts are whole grams and milliliters, with tenths below 1 g or 1 mL, and kilograms or liters to one decimal from 1,000 up. A small amount written in spoons stays in spoons.
- Counted ingredients stay counted: 3 cloves of garlic halved is 1 ½ cloves.
- An amount too small to measure shows as less than ⅛ of the unit.
Some examples:
| Ingredient | Scaled by | Metric | Imperial |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 cups flour | 0.7 | 331 mL | 1 ⅓ cups |
| ⅓ cup oil | 0.5 | 39 mL | 2 ⅔ tbsp |
| ½ tsp salt | 0.5 | ¼ tsp | ¼ tsp |
| 200 g chicken | 2 | 400 g | 1 lb |
| 3 cloves garlic | 0.5 | 1 ½ cloves | 1 ½ cloves |
Rounding is for reading the recipe. The nutrition always uses the exact amounts.
Which units you see
Recipes follow your own settings under Units & Measurements. Ingredient weights follow your food portion unit, grams or ounces. Liquids follow your liquid unit, milliliters and liters, or fluid ounces and cups. Counted ingredients are never converted. You can type an amount in either system wherever Loopa asks for one.
See Change your units and measurements to choose them.
A note when you scale a long way
When you scale a recipe to less than half or more than three times its size, Loopa adds a reminder: leaveners, salt, spices and cook times may need adjusting.
What changes with the servings, and what does not
The nutrition for one serving stays the same however many servings you make. The totals for the whole dish change with it.
Keeping a scaled version
Scaling is a view. It never edits the saved recipe. To keep a scaled version as a recipe of its own, tap Save as copy in the app. It is saved to My Recipes as a new recipe, and the original is untouched.
Offline
On iPhone, iPad and Android, your own recipes and the ones you saved are kept on the phone, and scaling is worked out on the phone, so you can open and scale them in the kitchen without a connection.
If your Premium ends
You can still open and scale your own recipes. Scaling recipes from the community and Loopa Kitchen is part of Loopa Premium.
See also
