Using Proportions in Recipes

Using Proportions in Recipes

Introduction

Recipes rely on proportional relationships to maintain taste and texture. Using proportions allows ingredient amounts to be adjusted while keeping the recipe balanced.

Suppose you want to bake a batch of muffins for a class party. The original recipe makes 6 muffins and uses 1.5 cups of flour.

But you need to make 18 muffins. That’s 3 times as many muffins, so you need 3 times as much flour, which is 4.5 cups of flour. Here, we use multiplicative reasoning by noticing the recipe is tripled. We can also r...