Servings Scaling & Sub-Recipe Multipliers

Cooking for a crowd of eight, preparing a romantic dinner for two, or meal-prepping double batches for the week usually means scribbling mental math on sticky notes. In the middle of sautéing and stirring, calculating “what is 1 1/2 tablespoons scaled by 1.75?” easily leads to over-salted sauces or ruined baking ratios.

Minthee eliminates kitchen guesswork with a real-time culinary scaling engine. With a single tap, ingredient quantities, fractions, ranges, and nested sub-recipes adapt instantaneously—while keeping your saved recipes safe and untouched in your offline library.

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1. Setting Base Servings (Add/Edit Recipe)

Every recipe in Minthee has an assigned baseline yield (defaulting to 4 servings). When authoring or editing a recipe:

1. Open any dish and tap the Edit (pencil) icon, or tap + on the home screen to create a new recipe.
2. In the Ingredients section, notice the minimal Servings Stepper positioned right at the top, just below the Ingredients header.
3. Use the – and + circular buttons to adjust the base recipe yield between 1 and 100 servings.
4. Direct Tap-to-Edit: For larger jumps (e.g. batch cooking for 24 people), tap the servings text directly to open a numeric keypad dialog. Type the exact number and tap Save.
5. Clear Action: If you set a custom count and wish to return to the standard default, tap the red Clear button.

[!NOTE] Setting the servings on the Add/Edit screen defines the recipe’s permanent baseline yield. It does not scale your entered ingredients while editing; it establishes the ground truth from which live scaling will calculate.

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2. Live Servings Scaling on Recipe Details

When you open a recipe to cook, Minthee features an interactive Scaler Bar embedded directly above the ingredients checklist.

A. Quick Multiplier Presets

Tap any of the dedicated multiplier chips to instantly recalculate the entire ingredient ledger:

• ½×: Cuts the recipe in half for solo dining or small side dishes.
• 1×: Instantly resets to the recipe’s standard base servings.
• 2×: Doubles the batch for dinner guests or weekend leftovers.
• 3×: Triples the recipe for large family gatherings and celebrations.

B. Precision Stepper Buttons

Need an exact headcount? Tap the – or + buttons next to the servings count. Minthee smoothly increments or decrements one serving at a time, automatically computing fractional multipliers (e.g., scaling a 4-serving lasagna to 5 servings calculates a precise $1.25\times$ multiplier).

C. Live Header Servings Badge

As you adjust the scaler, the recipe’s header badge updates in real time (e.g., displaying 6 servings · 1.5×), providing clear visual confirmation of your active scaling state.

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3. The Culinary Math Engine (How Quantities Scale)

Unlike basic calculators that spit out unwieldy numbers like 1.3333333 cups, Minthee’s culinary parser recognizes and preserves traditional kitchen measurements:

Fractions and Mixed Numbers

Fractions are parsed accurately and converted back into natural culinary fractions with automatic whole-number aggregation:

• ½ cup × 2 → 1 cup
• ¼ tsp × 2 → 1/2 tsp
• 1 1/2 tbsp × 2 → 3 tbsp
• 1/3 cup × 2 → 2/3 cup

Metric Weights and Volumes

Metric ingredients scale smoothly with clean decimal formatting up to two decimal places, stripping unnecessary trailing zeros:

• 50g × 2 → 100 g
• 500g × 1.5 → 750 g
• 600ml × 1.25 → 750 ml
• 1.5 kg × 0.5 → 0.75 kg

Bounded Quantity Ranges

Recipes frequently specify flexible ingredient ranges (such as garlic cloves or chilies). Minthee scales both ends of the range independently:

• 1-2 cloves × 2 → 2-4 cloves
• 1.5 - 2.5 tbsp × 2 → 3-5 tbsp

Qualitative Descriptors

Ingredients without numeric quantities (e.g., “salt to taste”, “pinch of nutmeg”, “fresh basil leaves”) are recognized as qualitative notes and remain intact without awkward numeric prefixes.

Ingredient	Original (4 Servings)	Scaled to 6 Servings (1.5×)	Scaled to 8 Servings (2×)
Flour	50g	75 g	100 g
Milk	600ml	900 ml	1200 ml
Butter	1 1/2 tbsp	2 1/4 tbsp	3 tbsp
Garlic	2-3 cloves	3-4.5 cloves	4-6 cloves
Black Pepper	to taste	to taste	to taste

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4. Sub-Recipe Multipliers & Compounding Ratios

Many complex dishes rely on nested components—known in Minthee as Sub-Recipes. For instance, a Classic Beef Lasagna may include linked recipes for Béchamel Sauce and Tomato Passata, while a Margherita Pizza links to Homemade Pizza Dough.

A. Sub-Recipes as Batch Multipliers

When an ingredient is linked to another recipe in your library, its quantity represents a batch multiplier rather than a mass or volume:

• 1x: One standard preparation batch of the linked sub-recipe.
• 2x: Two batches.
• 0.5x: Half a batch.

B. The Compounding Multiplier Formula

When you scale the parent dish, Minthee automatically compounds the sub-recipe’s base requirement with the parent recipe’s active scale factor:

$$\text{Effective Multiplier} = \text{Base Sub-Recipe Multiplier} \times \text{Parent Scale Factor}$$

Example Walkthrough:

Suppose your Lasagna recipe calls for 0.5x batch of Béchamel Sauce at its baseline 4 servings:

1. At Normal 4 Servings ($1\times$): The sub-recipe row displays 0.5x.
2. Scaled to 8 Servings ($2\times$): The math calculates $0.5 \times 2.0 = 1.0$, and the row updates to 1x (indicating you now need 1 full batch).
3. Scaled to 12 Servings ($3\times$): The calculation becomes $0.5 \times 3.0 = 1.5$, displaying 1.5x.

C. Direct Sub-Recipe Navigation

Each sub-recipe row features a prominent pill badge (e.g., [ 📖 Béchamel Sauce → ]). Tapping this badge takes you directly to the full sub-recipe page so you can review its steps, cooking techniques, and standalone ingredient list.

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5. Shopping List & Grocery Integration

Scaling connects directly with Minthee’s Aisle-Sorted Grocery List:

Snapshot-in-Time Addition

When you tap + Add all or tap individual ingredient cart icons on a scaled recipe:

• Minthee writes the exact scaled quantity directly into your shopping list (e.g., adding 100 g flour instead of the base 50g).
• Items appear with their associated source dish name tag so you know exactly why you’re buying them.

Non-Destructive Shopping Protection

If an ingredient is already on your shopping checklist and you subsequently change the servings on the recipe screen:

• The recipe screen dynamically displays the new scaled number.
• The item already saved in your shopping list remains unchanged.
• Why? This prevents accidental background overwrites of items you may have already reviewed, checked off in the supermarket, or combined with items from other meals.

Updating Existing Shopping Items

To refresh an existing grocery item with a new serving size:

1. Tap the ingredient row’s shopping icon once to remove it.
2. Tap it again to re-add it with the new scaled quantity.
3. Or tap Remove all followed by + Add all to refresh all ingredients in one tap.

Sub-Recipe Grocery Expansion

When importing a meal plan or recipe into the grocery list, Minthee looks inside linked sub-recipes and extracts their raw building blocks (e.g., butter, milk, and flour for Béchamel), multiplying each by the sub-recipe multiplier so your shopping checklist is 100% complete.

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6. Pro Tips for Scaled Cooking

• The Non-Destructive Invariant: Feel free to experiment with any serving count or multiplier. Scaling is strictly an in-memory view state; your original saved recipes and SQLite database records are never modified.
• Baking vs. Cooking: While savory sauces, soups, braises, and stir-fries scale linearly with perfection, delicate baking recipes (cakes, bread doughs, soufflés) depend on pan geometry and surface-area evaporation. Always verify pan sizes and oven times when scaling baked goods.
• Seasoning to Taste: Spices, hot peppers, and salt do not always scale strictly linearly when tripling or quadrupling recipes. Start with slightly less seasoning on large batches and adjust to taste during the final simmer.