About the Cooking Converter
Cooking recipes use wildly different units across countries — American books use cups and tablespoons, British books use pints and ounces, continental European books use grams and milliliters, and Australian and metric cups are very slightly different sizes. This tool converts between cooking volume units and between volume and ingredient weight for the staples (flour, sugar, butter, water, milk, honey) where density actually matters. Use it when scaling a recipe, converting an American cookbook for a metric kitchen, or halving and doubling quantities for different group sizes.
How to use it
- Pick the unit you have on the left (cups, tablespoons, milliliters, ounces, grams).
- Pick the unit you want on the right.
- For ingredients that vary by density (flour, sugar, butter) the converter applies the standard density so a 'cup of flour' gives the right gram weight.
- Type a value and read the result, or swap to go the other way.
Common cooking conversions
| 1 US cup | 240 mL |
| 1 UK / metric cup | 250 mL |
| 1 tablespoon (US) | 15 mL |
| 1 teaspoon | 5 mL |
| 1 fluid ounce (US) | 29.57 mL |
| 1 stick of butter | 113 g (½ cup) |
| 1 cup all-purpose flour | ≈ 125 g |
| 1 cup granulated sugar | ≈ 200 g |
| 1 cup brown sugar (packed) | ≈ 220 g |
| 1 cup water or milk | ≈ 240 g |
Frequently asked questions
- Why does a cup of flour weigh a different amount than a cup of sugar?
- A cup is a volume measurement, not a weight. Flour and sugar have different densities — flour is fluffy and sugar is dense — so the same volume contains different amounts of mass. That's why professional bakers use grams: 100 g of flour is always 100 g, no matter how it's scooped.
- Are US cups the same as metric cups?
- Almost, but not quite. A US legal cup is 240 mL, the US 'customary' cup used in recipes is about 236.6 mL, and metric / Australian cups are 250 mL. The differences are small enough that they don't usually break a recipe, but they add up when scaling.
- How accurate are the volume-to-weight conversions?
- The converter uses standard culinary densities (USDA values for water, milk, butter; widely-used reference values for flours and sugars). For most home cooking these are accurate to within a couple of grams per cup. Wholemeal flours, brown sugars, and ingredients that pack down can vary more — for baking, weighing on a kitchen scale is always more reliable.
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