Halving Recipes for Two and What Never Scales Down

Most recipes serve four, and most nights there are two of us. The easy answer is to cut every number in half, but that is how we ended up with a watery curry, a dry half-tray of brownies and a roast chicken thigh that was raw in the middle at the halved cooking time.

Halving recipes works well once you know which parts scale neatly and which do not. After a few years of cooking two portions at a time in a small flat kitchen, this is the short list we actually use.

What halving recipes gets right without any thought

Plenty of ingredients really do scale in a straight line. Halve them and move on:

Meat, fish, tofu and beans, measured by weight.
Vegetables, grains, pasta and rice.
Stock and tinned tomatoes in a stew or braise, as long as the pan shrinks too.
Butter, oil and sugar in most savoury cooking.

The trick is to switch to grams wherever you can. "Half a cup" of grated cheese is a guess. 40 grams is not. A digital scale costs about 12 pounds and earned its spot in our post on the small kitchen tools worth the counter space for exactly this reason.

The ingredients that never halve cleanly

Eggs

A recipe calling for three eggs leaves you with one and a half. Crack two into a jug, beat them, and weigh. A large egg without its shell is roughly 50 grams, so one and a half eggs is about 75 grams of beaten egg. The leftover goes into tomorrow's scrambled eggs or brushed over pastry.

Salt, spice and chilli

Spices are the one place we deliberately go above half. Smaller quantities lose a bit of punch in a shorter cook, and some heat is lost to the pan. Start at half, then taste near the end and add up to a quarter more. Salt is the opposite: start at slightly under half, because a smaller pot reduces faster and concentrates it.

Yeast and baking powder

Halve them exactly and measure carefully. A teaspoon of baking powder becomes half a teaspoon, not "a pinch." With yeast in bread, half a 7 gram sachet is 3.5 grams. If you bake bread for two often, a 100 gram tin of dried yeast is cheaper than sachets and easier to measure.

Liquids in a wide pan

This one ruined our curries for months. If you halve the stock but keep the same 28 centimetre pan, the liquid spreads thin and boils off twice as fast. Either drop to a smaller pan or keep around two thirds of the liquid and reduce it at the end.

Halving recipes changes pans and cooking times

Cooking time depends on thickness, not quantity. A chicken thigh takes the same 35 to 40 minutes at 200C whether there are two or eight on the tray. Halving the time because you halved the portions is the most common mistake we see, and a meat thermometer showing 75C in the thickest part is the only real check.

Pan size is where the maths gets fiddly. Halving a recipe means halving the area of the tin, not its width.

Original tin	Half recipe tin	Time change
23cm round cake tin	16cm round tin	Check 10 minutes early
20cm square brownie tin	15cm square, or a 2lb loaf tin	About 5 minutes less
33 x 23cm lasagne dish	23 x 16cm dish	Roughly 10 minutes less
12 hole muffin tin	6 holes, fill the empty ones with water	Same time

If the depth of food in the tin stays the same, the cooking time barely moves. If the halved batter sits shallower in the original tin, it cooks faster and dries out. That explains every flat, crunchy half-batch of brownies we ever made.

When we do not halve at all

The standard advice for couples is to always cook the full recipe and freeze the rest. We do this for some meals, and it is half the reason our weeknights work, as we wrote in our freezer habits post. But as a blanket rule, we think it is wrong.

Plenty of food is miserable after freezing. Pasta goes soft. Anything with a crisp coating turns soggy. Cream sauces split. Salads, stir fries and most fish dishes are simply worse the next day. Cooking four portions of those to eat two means either eating the same thing twice in a row or throwing it out, which is the opposite of what we want from cooking for two without waste.

Our rule now is short. We cook the full recipe when the dish freezes well and gets better with time: chilli, ragu, dal, soups, stews and curries with a tomato base. We halve everything else.

Our five-step routine for halving a new recipe

Convert to grams first. Before shopping, rewrite cups and spoons as weights. Five minutes at the table saves guessing at the hob.
Halve the main ingredients exactly. Protein, vegetables, grains and baking chemistry all get a straight half.
Adjust the awkward ones. Weigh beaten egg. Start spices at half and keep some back. Keep about two thirds of the liquid if the pan stays the same.
Pick the pan by area. Use the table above or a smaller pan with the same depth of food.
Keep the original cooking time as your guide. Start checking around three quarters of the way through, and trust a thermometer or a skewer over the clock.

We write our changes in pencil in the cookbook margin. The second time we make a halved recipe, it is usually exactly right.

A few recipes we halve every week

To give a sense of the real numbers, here is what our halved versions look like:

Carbonara: 160 grams of spaghetti, 75 grams of beaten egg plus one extra yolk, 50 grams of pecorino, 70 grams of guanciale or bacon.
Traybake chicken: 4 thighs, 400 grams of new potatoes, 1 red onion, 1 lemon. Same 40 minutes at 200C as the full version.
Banana bread: 2 ripe bananas, 125 grams of self-raising flour, 1 egg and 60 grams of butter, baked in a 1lb loaf tin for about 40 minutes instead of 60.

None of these taste like a compromise. They taste like a recipe that was written for two in the first place.

Frequently asked questions

How do you halve a recipe with 3 eggs?

Beat two eggs together and weigh out about 75 grams, which equals one and a half large eggs. Use the rest in another meal within a day or two. In baking, this is far more accurate than guessing with one or two whole eggs.

Do you halve the cooking time when you halve a recipe?

Usually not. Cooking time depends on the thickness of the food and the depth in the tin, not the total amount. Keep the original time as a guide and start checking about three quarters of the way through.

What size tin do I need for half a cake recipe?

Choose a tin with roughly half the base area. A 23 centimetre round cake becomes a 16 centimetre round, and a 20 centimetre square brownie tin becomes a 15 centimetre square or a loaf tin. Check for doneness 5 to 10 minutes early.