Nobody should have to guess whether they are doubling a recipe correctly. But the kitchen is where two measurement systems collide every day, where a nutrition label hides behind a serving size nobody actually eats, and where a recipe that serves four meets the eleven people who turned up. The Kitchen Math Workout is the practice book for all of it: fractions, conversions, scaling, labels, cost per plate, and the timing of a whole meal.
Every problem is drawn from a real kitchen. Every answer is worked out in full, at the end of the chapter it belongs to - not buried in the back of the book. No jargon, no assumptions about what you already know, and every recipe in the book is plant-based.
What's inside - 7 chapters plus a closing capstone, 449 practice problems, every answer worked:
Kitchen Fractions - halving, doubling, adding and dividing the fractions on every measuring cupMeasurements & Conversions - cups, tablespoons, grams, millilitres, ounces, and F ↔ CRecipe Scaling & Ratios - scaling factors, ratio recipes, and what does not scale straightNutrition Labels & Macros - the 4-4-9 rule, correcting for real serving sizes, comparing per 100 gMeal Planning & Budgeting - unit price, cost per serving, bulk-buy savings, and a weekly food budgetCooking Times & Temperature - time arithmetic, working backwards from serving time, oven conversionsKitchen Mental Math - the halving and doubling shortcuts, eyeball benchmarks, and the 10% trickOne Dinner Party, Every Skill - a closing capstone chapter that chains every skill into one running story, with a full walkthroughFive ways to practise each idea: A Warm-Up gets you moving with one-step questions. Standard problems build the mechanic. Word problems put the mechanic into a real kitchen. Mental-math challenges keep the shortcut sharp for the moment your hands are covered in flour. "Explain It" prompts make sure you actually understand - not just memorise.
Seven free companion calculators - no sign-up, nothing to install. Every chapter is paired with a free online tool at the companion site: a fraction calculator, a kitchen unit converter, a recipe scaler that returns real kitchen fractions, a nutrition-label calculator, a unit-price comparator, a cooking time-and-temperature planner, and a mental-math drill. Same math as the book - just faster when you are checking a label in the aisle. Plus a free printable toolkit with a worksheet for every chapter, sized for your printer.
Written for anyone who has ever closed a cookbook because of the numbers in it. You do not need a maths background. If you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, you can do every problem in this book - and you will cook with more confidence than you have in years.
Educational, not advisory. This book teaches the arithmetic behind cooking and food shopping. It is not dietary, nutritional, or food-safety advice. Cook to safe internal temperatures and check doneness rather than trusting a timer; the arithmetic itself is universal.
This book was written in collaboration with AI tools. Every worked example, exercise answer, and conversion factor was independently checked before publication - so what you see on the page is the arithmetic the book actually teaches.
Expanded printing - August 2026. This edition adds a Warm-Up set to every chapter, more worked diagrams, and a closing capstone chapter that chains every skill together in one running story - plus a hand-drawn opening illustration and larger in-book diagram type for every chapter.
The math behind a good meal is a small, friendly set of skills. This is your workout for it.