About Cook Better Now
Cook Better Now is a free collection of kitchen calculators, converters and baking tools. It is made by a small independent publisher that builds simple, free online tools. There is no big team or company behind it. The goal is to make everyday cooking maths quick and clear.
What the site is for
Recipes come in different units and sizes. You may have a recipe in cups but a scale that reads grams. You may need to cook for twelve when the recipe serves four. Or you may have a British recipe and an oven set in Fahrenheit. The tools on this site handle these jobs.
- Converters: cups, grams, tablespoons, teaspoons, ounces, millilitres, butter and oven temperature.
- Cooking tools: recipe scaler, serving size calculator, meat and turkey cooking time, baking pan size converter.
- Baking tools: yeast conversion, dough hydration, baker's percentage and sourdough calculators.
- Reference: an ingredient density database.
How the tools are designed and checked
Each tool does one job and shows the result right away. We build the calculations on standard unit definitions and simple formulas. We then test them with worked examples that can be checked by hand. For instance, 16 tablespoons make 1 US cup, so 2 tablespoons should come out as one eighth of a cup. Scaling a recipe from 4 servings to 12 should multiply every amount by 3.
Some conversions depend on the ingredient. A cup of flour weighs less than a cup of sugar, and the weight also changes with how you fill the cup. For that reason, weight-based results are best treated as a good starting point. A kitchen scale is more accurate.
Cooking times are guides only. Ovens, cuts of meat and starting temperatures vary. Always check that food is cooked through with a food thermometer and follow the safety guidance for the food you are preparing.
How the site is funded
The tools are free to use. The site uses Google AdSense to show advertising, which helps cover running costs. It also uses Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used. You can read the details in our privacy policy.
Contact us
Found a mistake, a bug, or a tool you would like to see? Write to us at thefreecollection@gmail.com. We read every message and use your feedback to fix errors and improve the tools.