No, You Can’t Always Just Double a Recipe

Well, unfortunately, the answer isn’t quite as simple.

Whether due to cook time, equipment capacity, or altered visual cues, certain recipes do not lend themselves to being doubled. And while there’s no one-size-fits-all answer for every instance, we asked our test cooks when they would and wouldn’t double a recipe.

Here’s what we found out.

You would think that one cup of rice cooked in one and a half cups of water could easily become two cups of rice cooked in three cups of water and turn out the same. That’s not the case, though. Rice absorbs water in a 1:1 ratio, no matter the volume, so simply doubling both the rice and the water leads to mushy rice because there is an excess of water.

The same goes for other ingredients cooked with the absorption method (though using the pasta method of cooking grains will help you avoid this fate). If you double all the ingredients for a batch of beans, for example, “you will have twice as much liquid, but the same surface area as a single batch, so you'll need to allow more time for evaporation for that double batch,” Cook’s Illustrated Deputy Food Editor Andrea Geary suggests.

Cook’s Country Test Cook Kelly Song warns that when frying, you need to pay extra attention to how your oil is faring over the course of several extra batches. “Your frying oil might collect residue between extra batches, or crispy items might sog out if they sit for too long. You would need to take extra precautions, such as cleaning out your oil halfway or using a low-temperature oven to keep food hot.”

When baking, time in the oven and the temperature to bake at is determined by several factors, most important of which are the depth and surface area of the dough or batter you’re working with. Naturally, those elements are going to be different if you double a batch to make a larger loaf or cake.

“It becomes more complex when you’re talking about several portions that are baked as a single unit—pies, cakes, quick breads, pull-apart dinner rolls, etc.,” Andrea Geary says. 

“You can mix up a double batch of dinner rolls by simply doubling the ingredients, but you should still bake each batch in its own pan to ensure that the time and temp work as the recipe states.”

One-pot recipes such as stews, pastas, or certain sheet-pan meals can be doubled without worry so long as you keep an eye on your cooking equipment and can verify that the capacity is enough to hold double the ingredients.

When it comes to things that are baked in individual portions, such as cookies, cupcakes, or biscuits, there is no need to change the proportions of ingredients or the baking time, since the temperature and time only applies to each individual unit.

Below are some things to keep in mind when doubling recipes, straight from the test cooks themselves. 

1. Consider Equipment Capacity: You should always pay attention to your equipment’s capacity when doubling recipes, according to Kelly Song. 

“Even if the ingredients all fit in a vessel (which they might not to begin with), the outcome isn’t always the same,” she says. “Doubling a batch of dough in a food processor or overfilling your stand mixer, for example, can lead to over-mixing or uneven spots, which will affect the texture of the final product.”

2. Pay attention to visual cues: When doubling recipes, the time may change, so it may take longer to achieve optimal results. According to Cook’s Illustrated’s Senior Editor Lan Lam, “Our recipes generally give an instruction, followed by a visual cue, and then a time. If you’re changing up a recipe (by doubling, halving, substituting other equipment or ingredients), then that cue becomes critical. Changes to a recipe will affect the cooking time, and so you need to use the visual cue because it tells you when to move on to the next step.”

3. Make two batches: At the end of the day, the safest recommendation we can offer is to make two batches of the same dish to ensure that it turns out exactly as it should and the way that our test cooks have developed iy in the kitchen.