Recipe Scaling and Yield

Every recipe has a yield — how many servings it makes as written. Scaling multiplies its ingredients by whatever factor gets you from that yield to the number you need.

Scaling one recipe

Open a recipe and use Scale Recipe. Enter the servings you need and the ingredient quantities recalculate.

Cost per serving does not change when you scale — it is a per-serving figure. Total cost does.

Scaling a whole event

You rarely scale by hand. Generating a prep plan on a catering order does it for every recipe at once: KitchenSync reads the menu selections, counts the servings needed for each dish, and scales each recipe to match.

That is the path worth learning. A 132-guest order where 65 chose chicken scales the chicken recipe to 65 servings, not 132.

Where the arithmetic stops

Scaling is straight multiplication, and kitchens know that only takes you so far.

• Seasoning does not scale linearly. Ten times the recipe rarely wants ten times the salt or the chili.
• Cook times do not scale at all. A tray that serves 50 does not cook in the same time as one that serves 10, and the software does not adjust for it. The duration estimate on a prep task scales with volume, not with the physics of a larger pan.
• Equipment capacity is not modeled. Scaling to 400 servings will not tell you it needs four passes through your oven.
• There is no as-purchased versus as-prepared distinction. If a recipe lists 2 lb of trimmed fillet, the prep list asks for 2 lb of trimmed fillet — not the 3 lb of whole fish you have to buy to get it. Build that into the ingredient quantity yourself.

Use the scaled numbers as a starting point and let the chef correct them. Nothing in KitchenSync will stop you overriding a scaled quantity.

Yield is worth getting right

Because everything above depends on it, and because a wrong yield is invisible. A recipe that claims 50 servings but really plates 40 will under-order by 20% every time, and will also understate its cost per serving by the same margin.

If you only tidy one field on your recipes, tidy this one.