Most Korean recipes are written for four, and halving “1 1/2 tbsp” in your head while the pan heats up is how dishes end up too salty. Paste an ingredient list, set the servings, and every quantity is recalculated — fractions for spoons and cups, rounded numbers for grams.
What scales and what doesn’t
- Main ingredients (meat, vegetables, noodles, rice) scale directly.
- Salty seasonings — soy sauce, doenjang, fish sauce, salt — rarely need the full multiple when you double a recipe. Start with about 80% and taste.
- Gochugaru and gochujang get noticeably hotter in a bigger batch; add the last part gradually.
- Cooking times don’t double. A larger pot of stew needs a few more minutes to come to a boil, but simmering time stays similar. Stir-fries should be cooked in batches instead of crowding the pan.
- Eggs can’t be split easily — round to the nearest whole egg, or beat and measure by weight (about 50 g per large egg without shell).
Handy equivalents
| Measure | Equals |
|---|---|
| 1 tbsp | 3 tsp (about 15 ml) |
| 1 cup (US) | 16 tbsp (about 240 ml) |
| 1 Korean cup (컵) | 200 ml in many Korean recipes |
| 1 clove garlic | about 1 tsp minced |
Need grams instead of cups? Use our measurement converter. Not sure what an ingredient is? See the Korean pantry guide.