Ingredient Converter

How this converter works

Every conversion here runs through one number: how many grams of that specific ingredient fill one US cup. Give the tool an amount in any unit and it converts to that grams figure first, then back out to every other unit from there. Volume units are pure arithmetic once you have the gram figure — a cup is 16 tablespoons and 48 teaspoons and 236.588 millilitres no matter what is in it — so the only genuinely ingredient-specific step, and the only place an error can enter, is that single density value.

That is also why the tool refuses to work from a generic factor. Recipe software and printed charts often apply one "1 cup = 240 g" rule to everything in the kitchen. That number is only true for water. Flour packs air between its granules, so a cup weighs roughly 120 g when spooned in and levelled off — but the same cup can weigh 150 g or more scooped straight from the bag, because scooping compresses it. Granulated sugar sits closer to 200 g a cup. Honey, dense and syrupy, runs closer to 340 g. Those are not rounding differences; they are the physical density of the ingredient, and a bread dough built on the wrong one goes from workable to gluey.

The conversion runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, there is no account, and the whole density table ships with the page — which is why the result appears as you type rather than after a round trip, and why the tool works the same with the recipe tab open and the connection dropping in and out on a kitchen phone.

How to read the result

The grams box is highlighted because it is the one that resolves the ambiguity — it is the figure a kitchen scale can actually verify. The cups box shows the nearest practical kitchen fraction (⅔, 1¼) with the exact decimal beneath it, because measuring cups are marked in fractions and nobody owns a 0.417-cup measure. Tablespoons and teaspoons come from the same cup figure, so for small amounts they are usually the easier way to measure: 3 tablespoons of a thing is a far more repeatable action than eyeballing 0.19 of a cup.

Milliliters are volume, not weight, and are worth one caution. Converting 100 g of honey to millilitres gives you the space that honey occupies, which is useful for fitting it into a jar and useless for measuring it with a liquid jug if the recipe wanted 100 g. Where a recipe is written by weight, stay in weight. The line under the results always states the exact density used, so if you disagree with the figure — and there are legitimate disagreements, particularly about brown sugar and how hard it was packed — you can see precisely what the tool assumed rather than having to reverse-engineer it.

Some ingredients carry an extra note under the result. That flag means the cup figure is mathematically correct but practically odd: a cup of ground cinnamon is a real quantity of cinnamon and not a thing any recipe asks for, so the useful number on that ingredient is the teaspoon one. Ingredients measured only by the piece — eggs, whole vegetables — are not in the list at all, because there is no honest cup weight to give.

Two mistakes that beat any converter

The first is scooping flour or powdered sugar straight from the container with the measuring cup, which typically over-fills it by 15–20%. Spoon the ingredient into the cup loosely and level the top with a knife edge — no packing, no tapping to settle it. Every flour figure here assumes the spoon-and-level method, so scooping will make your result read light against the scale. The second is treating "cup" as one international unit: a US cup is 236.588 ml and an Australian or UK metric cup is 250 ml, so a recipe written for one and measured with the other is roughly 5% out before density is even involved.

Form matters too, and it is not a rounding issue. A cup of raw chopped spinach and a cup of cooked spinach differ by several times over, because cooking collapses the leaf and drives out water. Where a form distinction like that changes the answer, it gets its own entry in the ingredient list rather than an averaged number that would be wrong for both.