Cooking Measurement Conversion Guide: Cups, Tablespoons, and Grams

A recipe written by a British baker in grams, tested by an American cook in cups, and shared with an Australian friend whose tablespoon is a different size than everyone else's — kitchen measurement is more inconsistent than most people realize, and it is the reason cakes come out dense or cookies spread too thin.

Volume Conversions You Actually Need

1 US cup equals 16 tablespoons, or 48 teaspoons, or about 236.6 milliliters. 1 tablespoon equals 3 teaspoons, or about 14.8 milliliters. 1 fluid ounce equals 2 tablespoons, or about 29.6 milliliters. A US pint is 2 cups (473 ml), and a US quart is 4 cups (946 ml). These ratios stay constant regardless of what you are measuring, since they describe volume, not weight.

Why Cups Are Unreliable for Baking

A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 120 to 150 grams depending on whether it is sifted, scooped and leveled, or packed down, because flour compresses differently depending on handling. That is up to a 25 percent swing in actual flour content for the exact same "1 cup" measurement, which explains why the same recipe can turn out drastically different between two cooks using cup measurements. This is why professional bakers and most European recipes measure flour, sugar, and other dry ingredients by weight in grams instead of volume, since 150 grams of flour is 150 grams of flour no matter how it settles in the container.

Common Ingredient Weight Conversions

These are approximate but widely used baking reference values:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour = about 120-125 grams
• 1 cup granulated sugar = about 200 grams
• 1 cup packed brown sugar = about 220 grams
• 1 cup butter = 227 grams (2 sticks in US butter packaging)
• 1 cup milk or water = about 240 grams (since water is close to 1 g/ml)
• 1 cup honey = about 340 grams

The US Cup Versus the Metric Cup Trap

A US cup is 236.6 ml, but an Australian, British, and Canadian "metric cup" is defined as exactly 250 ml, and a legal UK cup used historically is closer to 284 ml. That difference (236.6 versus 250 ml) is about 5.6 percent, small per cup but compounding across a recipe with several cup measurements of different ingredients. Recipes from international food blogs should specify which cup standard they use, but many do not, which is a frequent hidden source of recipe failures when following recipes from a different country than your measuring cups.

Converting Oven Temperatures Too

Recipes traveling internationally often need temperature conversion alongside volume: Fahrenheit to Celsius uses C = (F - 32) x 5/9. A 350°F oven, extremely common in American baking, converts to 177°C, which most people round to 180°C. A 425°F roasting temperature converts to about 218°C. Getting this wrong by using the Fahrenheit number directly as if it were Celsius would produce a wildly under- or over-heated oven.

A Worked Example: Scaling a Recipe

Suppose a cookie recipe calls for 2 and 1/4 cups of flour (about 280 grams) and you want to make 1.5 times the batch. In volume terms that is 3 and 3/8 cups, an awkward measurement to eyeball accurately with standard cup sets. In weight terms it is simply 280 x 1.5 = 420 grams, which any kitchen scale measures precisely regardless of how oddly the fraction lands. This is the practical case for why weighing ingredients scales more reliably than volume measuring, especially for anything other than whole-number multiples.

Convert Kitchen Measurements Instantly

Our unit converter switches between cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, ounces, grams, and milliliters in seconds, so you can follow a recipe written in any measurement system without doing the arithmetic yourself mid-cook.