How to scale a recipe and convert cups to grams
Most recipes are written for someone else’s table and someone else’s measuring cups. Scaling and converting by hand is where mistakes creep in — especially turning a cup of flour into grams, which depends on the ingredient, not just the unit.
Scale a recipe
- Open the recipe and find the Servings card.
- Use the stepper to scale from a quarter of the recipe up to eight times it, in quarter steps. A badge such as ×2 shows the current scale.
- Every ingredient updates, with originally … beneath it so you can always see the recipe as written.
Plate & Page remembers the servings you chose for each recipe. The next time you open it — or plan it for the week — it starts at your number. Cooking Mode has its own servings control in the Ingredients sheet, and each step lists the scaled ingredients it needs.
Choose your units
In Settings › Unit settings, pick Metric, US or Imperial. Recipes and grocery lists are shown in that system.
- Cups, tablespoons and teaspoons are shown as familiar fractions like ½, ⅓ and ¾ rather than long decimals.
- Grams and millilitres are rounded to whole numbers once they’re large enough that decimals stop mattering.
Cups to grams (and back)
Converting a volume to a weight needs the ingredient’s density: a cup of flour and a cup of sugar weigh very different amounts. With Convert Between Volume and Weight turned on (it is by default), Plate & Page uses a bundled reference table of about 450 ingredients:
- With Metric, ingredients with a known density are shown by weight — cups of flour become grams.
- With US or Imperial, weights of those ingredients are shown as volumes.
- Descriptions such as “dried”, “ground” or “fresh chopped” pick the right entry, because a cup of ground spice and a cup of whole spice differ.
- Ingredients without a known density are converted only within the same kind of unit — cups to millilitres, ounces to grams — never guessed.
On devices with Apple Intelligence, an unfamiliar ingredient name can be matched privately to an existing entry in that table, and the app asks before using it. It never invents a new density.
Want an ingredient left exactly as written? Add a keyword under Settings › Weight Conversion Exceptions and matching ingredients stay in their original units.
What’s free
Scaling and unit conversion are included in the free edition, along with export and iCloud sync.