Cups to grams, by ingredient

Why a cup is not a fixed weight

Cups and spoons measure volume; kitchen scales measure mass. The link between them is the ingredient's density, and it changes a lot: a US cup of water weighs about 237 g, a cup of flour about 125 g and a cup of honey about 340 g. That is why "1 cup = 240 g" rules of thumb ruin cakes.

This converter keeps a separate weight for each ingredient, so the answer matches what you actually have in the bowl. Weights are typical averages from standard kitchen reference charts for ingredients spooned into the cup and levelled with a knife. Scooping flour straight from the bag packs it and can add 10 to 20 percent, so weigh when precision matters, as in bread and pastry.

US cups, metric cups and spoons

• US cup: 236.6 ml. Used in most American recipes.
• Metric cup: 250 ml. Used in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many newer recipes.
• Tablespoon: 14.8 ml (US). An Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, so check where a recipe is from.
• Teaspoon: 4.9 ml.
• Fluid ounce (US): 29.6 ml, a volume. A weight ounce is 28.35 g; the converter lists them separately.

Liquids such as water and milk convert almost one to one between millilitres and grams, which makes metric recipes forgiving. Dry ingredients do not.

How the recipe scaler works

Paste an ingredient list, one item per line, and set how many people the recipe serves and how many you want to feed. The scaler multiplies the number at the start of each line and rounds spoon and cup amounts to fractions you can measure (1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4). Metric amounts are rounded to sensible whole numbers. Lines without a quantity, such as "a pinch of salt", stay as they are.

Two things do not scale in a straight line: baking times and eggs. A larger cake in a deeper tin needs a lower temperature and more time, and an egg does not divide; when the scaled amount is not a whole egg, beat the eggs and weigh them (about 50 g of egg without the shell for a large egg).

Questions