Reading a Degchi Recipe: Metric, US Cups and Servings

The recipe that never quite fits

Maybe your mother gave you the method over the phone, in handfuls and "until it smells right". Maybe you found a recipe online written in grams while your measuring cups are the American kind. Or the recipe serves four and you are cooking for six on a Friday.

Each of those is a small fix, and each one is easy to get wrong halfway through dinner. A recipe page in Degchi is built to remove all three in one place, so you can read it once and start cooking.

What is on the page

Open any dish, for example butter chicken, and you will see these things from top to bottom:

• The photo, with its credit. Dishes that have a photo show who took it and under which licence.
• Your taste. Two thumbs, "I like this" and "I don't like this". Tap one and Degchi remembers it.
• Ingredients, checked against your pantry. Each ingredient shows Have or Out, and a counter such as "6 of 6 in pantry" tells you at a glance whether you can start now.
• Units and servings. A Metric / US switch and a servings control with minus and plus buttons.
• Steps. Numbered, and any step with waiting time carries a timer.
• Tips. Short notes from the recipe, such as why you char the chicken first.
• Start cooking. A button at the bottom that opens cook mode.

Metric and US, one tap apart

Butter chicken is a good test because it mixes weight, volume and counting. In Metric you see 600 g of boneless chicken, 100 g of yogurt and 100 ml of cream. Switch to US and the same lines read in pounds and cups, while spoon measures such as teaspoons and tablespoons stay as they are.

You do not have to calculate anything, and you do not have to keep a conversion chart open on the counter. Degchi remembers the setting you choose, so the next recipe opens the same way.

Scaling servings without ugly numbers

Say the recipe is written for four people and your table is six. Press the plus button on the servings control twice. Every quantity scales together: 600 g of chicken becomes 900 g, and the rest follow in proportion.

If you have ever tried to multiply 1.5 teaspoons by 1.5 in your head, you will like the next part. Degchi rounds amounts to fractions people actually measure with: a quarter, a third, a half, two thirds or three quarters, instead of showing "0.667 cup". Spices that are listed "to taste" stay as they are.

One more detail that saves time: the servings you pick on the recipe page carry into cook mode, so the amounts you see while cooking match the ones you shopped for.

Following a recipe in your own kitchen

A recipe is only useful if you can follow it in your own kitchen, with your own measuring tools and your own number of guests. That is the whole idea behind this page.

• No conversion maths. Grams or cups, your choice, saved for next time.
• No guessing at quantities. Scale to your headcount and the maths is done for you.
• No surprise at the stove. The pantry check shows what you are missing before you start, and missing items can go straight onto your shopping list.

It matters most for families who cook South Asian, Gulf or Bangladeshi food outside the region, where the recipe is in one measuring system and the kitchen is in another. The same applies to dishes like chicken tikka masala and paneer butter masala: pick your units, pick your servings, and go.

Not sure how the pantry check knows what you own? That comes from the three states described in How to Track Your Pantry with Have, Low and Out.

Try it

Degchi is a free beta, and recipe pages like this one are the heart of it. If you would like to try them with your own pantry and your own family, join the Degchi beta with a Gmail address and we will let you know when your invite is ready.