Convert Any Ingredient

Why one conversion factor doesn't work for every ingredient

Recipe software and printed conversion charts often apply a single "1 cup = 240g" rule to everything in the kitchen. That number is only true for water. Flour packs air between its granules, so a cup weighs roughly 120g when spooned into the cup and leveled off — but the same cup can weigh 150g or more if it's scooped straight from the bag, because scooping compresses the flour. Granulated sugar sits closer to 200g a cup. Honey, being dense and syrupy, runs closer to 340g. None of those differences are rounding noise; they're the actual physical density of the ingredient, and a baking recipe that assumes the wrong one can shift a dough from workable to gluey.

That's the reason this hub exists as individual per-ingredient pages instead of one generic calculator. Each ingredient page below carries its own grams-per-cup figure, checked against a published baking reference rather than estimated, plus the tablespoon, teaspoon, ounce, and milliliter equivalents worked out from that same figure — so switching a recipe from cups to a kitchen scale doesn't introduce a new error along the way.

Weight-based measuring matters most in baking, where ratios are chemistry, and matters least in things like soup or stir-fry, where a slightly generous handful of chopped vegetables changes nothing. If you're converting a savory recipe, cup measurements are usually forgiving enough to eyeball. If you're converting a baking recipe — especially one with a delicate hydration ratio like bread dough or macarons — the gram figure on the relevant page below is the one worth trusting over a rounded cup estimate.

Two conversion mistakes worth knowing about

The first is scooping flour or powdered sugar directly from the container with the measuring cup, which typically over-fills it by 15–20%. The fix is to spoon the ingredient into the cup loosely, then level the top with a knife edge — no packing, no shaking to settle it. The second is treating "cup" as a universal unit across countries: a US cup (236.6 ml) and an Australian or UK "metric cup" (250 ml) aren't the same size, so a recipe written for one and measured with the other is already off by about 5% before density even enters the picture. Every conversion page here uses the US customary cup unless the page says otherwise.

Some ingredients also have more than one relevant form — chopped versus whole, raw versus cooked, sifted versus unsifted — and each of those forms genuinely weighs differently. A cup of raw chopped spinach weighs far less than a cup of cooked spinach because cooking collapses the leaf structure and drives out water; treating the two as the same figure would be wrong by a factor of several times over. Where a form distinction like that matters, it gets its own conversion entry rather than a single averaged number.