Pancake Recipe Calculator

Background.

How many pancakes does a bag of flour make? For most recipes nobody can say, because they list ingredients but never how much batter goes into each pancake. King Arthur Baking's Simply Perfect Pancakes is an exception: it yields a dozen large 4½-inch pancakes and tells you to drop quarter-cupfuls onto the griddle. Twelve quarter cups is exactly 3 cups of batter, so the recipe fixes its own batter volume, and everything here scales from that one figure.

The published batch is 180 g of all-purpose flour, 283 g of milk, 43 g of melted butter or vegetable oil, 25 g of granulated sugar, 2 large eggs, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and ¾ teaspoon of table salt. Ask for 12 pancakes at a quarter cup and those are exactly the amounts you get back.

The scoop decides how the batter is divided, not what goes into it. One published batch makes 24 silver-dollar pancakes from 2-tablespoon scoops, 12 at a quarter cup or 9 at a third of a cup, with identical ingredients. The diameter shown for the smaller and larger scoops is an estimate that assumes the batter spreads to the same thickness as the published pancake.

What is pancake recipe calculator?

Scaling a recipe means multiplying every ingredient by one factor. Here that factor, the batch scale, is the batter you need divided by the published 3 cups. Weights come from the recipe itself, and the two ingredients it gives only in teaspoons are also converted to grams with King Arthur's Ingredient Weight Chart: 4 g per teaspoon of baking powder and 6 g per teaspoon of table salt, from the chart's 18 g per tablespoon. Recipe and chart agree closely: 180 g for 1½ cups of flour is exactly the chart's 120 g a cup, and the milk, sugar and butter weights all sit within 1.5% of the chart's figures.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Choose what you know: how many pancakes you want, how many people you are feeding, or how much flour you have.
2. 02Fill in only the field for that choice; the others are ignored. For a headcount, also set pancakes each — half pancakes are allowed, and the total is rounded up to a whole one.
3. 03Pick the scoop you will pour with: 2 tablespoons for silver-dollar pancakes, ¼ cup for the recipe's own 4½-inch size, ⅓ cup for larger ones.
4. 04Weigh the flour, milk, fat and sugar. Measure baking powder and salt with spoons, or weigh them with the gram figures if your scale reads single grams.
5. 05For a fractional egg, beat whole eggs together and weigh out 50 g of beaten egg for each egg the recipe calls for.

The formula.

The anchor is the published batch: 12 pancakes × ¼ cup = 3 cups of batter. The batter volume V depends on where you start — pancakes × scoop; people × pancakes each, rounded up, × scoop; or 3 × flour ÷ 180 when you start from flour. The batch scale is s = V ÷ 3, and each ingredient is its published amount times s: flour 180s g, milk 283s g, fat 43s g, sugar 25s g, eggs 2s, baking powder 2s teaspoons and salt 0.75s teaspoons. The total batter weight adds the gram figures, counting each large egg as 50 g. The pancake diameter is the published 4.5 inches times √(scoop ÷ ¼ cup), which follows if batter spreads to a fixed thickness whatever the scoop — about 0.2269 inches, or 5.76 mm, of raw batter for the published pancake. Griddle heat, how long the batter has rested and how fast you pour all change the real spread. Starting from flour, the yield is rounded down while the ingredients still use all the flour, so a spoonful or two of batter may be left over.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]King Arthur Baking Company. 'Simply Perfect Pancakes' recipe. Source of every reference quantity — 2 large eggs, 1 1/4 cups (283g) milk, 3 tablespoons (43g) melted butter or vegetable oil, 1 1/2 cups (180g) all-purpose flour, 3/4 teaspoon table salt, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 2 tablespoons (25g) granulated sugar — of the yield '1 dozen large (4 1/2") pancakes', and of the instruction 'Drop 1/4 cupfuls of batter onto the lightly greased griddle.'
2. [2]King Arthur Baking Company. 'Ingredient Weight Chart.' Source of baking powder at 1 teaspoon = 4 g, table salt at 1 tablespoon = 18 g (6 g per teaspoon), one large egg at 50 g, all-purpose flour at 1 cup = 120 g, milk at 1 cup = 227 g, granulated sugar at 1 cup = 198 g and butter at 8 tablespoons = 113 g.
3. [3]General Mills / Betty Crocker. 'Bisquick Pancakes' recipe. Independent confirmation of the quarter-cup batter scoop — 'For each pancake, pour scant 1/4 cupfuls of batter onto the hot griddle', 'Makes 14 pancakes' — and the source of the egg-ratio comparison noted on this page.
4. [4]National Institute of Standards and Technology (2008). 'Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI), NIST Special Publication 811', Appendix B.8. The US liquid gallon is exactly 231 cubic inches, from which 1 cup = 236.5882365 mL and 1 tablespoon = 14.78676478125 mL follow exactly — the basis for treating 2 tablespoons as exactly one eighth of a cup.