Cooking & Kitchen Converter
Serving sizes, cups to grams, tablespoons, teaspoons, oven temps, and grocery weight conversions.
Cooking and kitchen conversions bridge two different worlds: the weight-based systems used in professional kitchens and most of the world's recipes, and the volume-based cups and spoons common in US home cooking. Knowing how to move between them opens up a much larger library of recipes and helps produce more consistent results. Whether you're scaling a recipe up for a crowd, adapting a British dessert, or following a weight-based sourdough formula, accurate measurement is the foundation of good cooking.
Popular Cooking & Kitchen Conversions
Weight vs. Volume: Why Bakers Prefer Grams
Volume measures like cups and tablespoons introduce variability because the density of ingredients changes with how they're packed, sifted, or settled. A loosely spooned cup of all-purpose flour weighs about 120 grams; a packed cup can weigh up to 150 grams — a 25% difference that can ruin a cake recipe. Bread bakers, pastry chefs, and chocolatiers worldwide use grams for this reason. For liquid ingredients like water, milk, or oil, volume and weight are nearly interchangeable (1 mL of water ≈ 1 gram), making cups perfectly adequate.
Common Ingredient Conversions
The most-needed kitchen conversions are ingredient-specific because density varies. One cup of granulated sugar weighs about 200 grams, while one cup of powdered sugar is only 120 grams. One cup of all-purpose flour is roughly 120–130 grams, but bread flour is slightly heavier at around 130–135 grams. Butter is often measured in both sticks (US) and grams: one stick of US butter is 113 grams or 8 tablespoons. When following a European recipe that calls for 250 grams of butter, that is slightly more than 2 US sticks.
| Ingredient | Weight Equivalent |
|---|---|
| All-purpose flour (1 cup) | ~120–130 g |
| Granulated sugar (1 cup) | ~200 g |
| Butter (1 stick / 8 tbsp) | 113 g / 4 oz |
| Honey / maple syrup (1 tbsp) | ~21 g |
| Table salt (1 tsp) | ~6 g |
| Water / milk (1 cup) | 240 mL / ~240 g |
Oven Temperature and Scaling
Recipe temperatures present another conversion challenge. UK and Australian recipes often give oven temperatures in both Celsius and gas marks (e.g., 180°C / Gas Mark 4), while US recipes use Fahrenheit (350°F). These are the same temperature: 180°C = 356°F. For scaling recipes, most quantities scale linearly — double the ingredients, double the pan size. Cooking time, however, doesn't scale proportionally: a larger item takes more time, but not double. A useful rule of thumb is to increase baking time by 20–30% when doubling a recipe, then check for doneness.
Further Reading
Sources & References
- USDA — Food Measurement Equivalents — Cup, tablespoon, and weight equivalents from the US Department of Agriculture.