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Cooking measurement converter

Cooking measurement converter

Cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, millilitres, grams and ounces converted on the exact definitions, with the cup convention and any ingredient density chosen rather than assumed.

How this is calculated

Volume units are defined in millilitres and weight units in grams, both exactly: a tablespoon is 15 ml, an ounce is 28.349523125 g. Crossing between the two needs the density you enter, because that relationship is a property of the ingredient and not of arithmetic.

  • A cup is not one thing: 236.588 ml in the US customary cup, 240 ml in a legal nutrition label, 250 ml in India, Australia and the metric cup, and an Australian tablespoon is 20 ml rather than 15. The unit you pick says which convention the answer is in.
  • Nothing here converts a volume of an ingredient to a weight without being told the density, which is why a recipe that gives both is the only safe source for the second figure.

Cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, millilitres, grams and ounces converted on their definitions, with the cup convention and any ingredient density chosen on the form instead of assumed by the page.

A cup is not one thing

The US customary cup is 236.588 ml, a cup on a US nutrition label is 240 ml, and the metric cup used in India, Australia and much of the Commonwealth is 250 ml. A tablespoon is 15 ml almost everywhere except Australia, where it is 20. An imperial fluid ounce is not a US fluid ounce either. So the unit chosen on the form is not a cosmetic detail — it is the convention the answer is written in, and two recipes that both say “one cup” can differ by the volume of a tablespoon before anything is cooked.

The line under the results prints the definitions used, so the answer can be checked against whichever book it came from.

Volume and weight do not convert between themselves

A cup is a space; a gram is a mass. What sits between them is the ingredient, and it is why a cup of flour, a cup of rice, a cup of oil and a cup of chopped onion are four different weights. This page will not answer across the two families until it is given a density in grams per millilitre, and it will not invent one — a figure lifted from a general table will be someone else’s ingredient, packed someone else’s way.

The way to get a real one is once: weigh what fills the cup, divide the grams by the millilitres, and keep that number for that ingredient. Sifted and scooped flour differ, which is exactly why the measurement is yours.

Within one family the answer is arithmetic

Millilitres to cups, grams to ounces, teaspoons to tablespoons: those are fixed ratios between definitions, and they are exact to the figures stated on the form. Nothing about the ingredient matters, because nothing about the ingredient changes what a tablespoon is.

Questions readers ask

How many grams is a cup of flour?

Between roughly 110 and 140 grams for a 250 ml cup, depending on whether the flour was sifted, spooned or scooped — which is why the page asks for a density instead of publishing a number. Weigh one cup from your own bag and the answer stops being a range.

Which cup should I pick for an Indian recipe?

The metric cup at 250 ml, unless the recipe says otherwise. An old British book may mean an imperial measure and a translated American one may mean a legal cup, so check the source rather than the ingredient list.

Why do two converters disagree?

Usually the cup: a difference between 236.588 ml and 250 ml is about six per cent, which is invisible in one line of a recipe and decisive in a batch of fifty. Rounding to a whole tablespoon adds the rest.