Cooking Converter

Convert a recipe measurement between cups, spoons, millilitres and grams, using the weight per cup of the ingredient you name.

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What this tool does

Cooking Converter carries nineteen kitchen units. Fifteen are volume — teaspoon, tablespoon, US fluid ounce, US cup, the 250 ml metric cup, pint, quart, gallon, millilitre, litre, UK fluid ounce, UK pint, a pinch at a sixteenth of a teaspoon, a dash at an eighth, and a stick of butter at half a cup — and four are weight: gram, kilogram, ounce and pound. Anything converted inside one of those two groups is a fixed ratio, so 3 tbsp to tsp is exact arithmetic that needs to know nothing about what you are measuring.

Crossing between the groups is the part that needs an ingredient. A cup of cocoa powder weighs 85 g and a cup of honey weighs 340 g — the same space, four times the weight — so cups to grams has no single answer. The tool holds a reference weight per US cup for 31 ingredients: flours, sugars, dairy, fats, syrups, oats, rice, two salts, raising agents, nuts, dried fruit, breadcrumbs and cheese. The menu prints each figure beside the name, so the number being applied is visible before you run anything, and the ingredient can also be written into the line — type 250 g butter to cups and that one line sets the unit, the ingredient and the target itself.

What a reference table cannot know is how you filled the cup. All-purpose flour is stored here at 125 g per cup, the spooned-and-levelled figure; the same cup dipped into the bag and pressed down holds 145 g or more, and that gap is the difference between a tender crumb and a dry one. So read cups-to-grams as the best single figure for that ingredient rather than a measurement of your cup, and note that the error runs the other way too: grams to cups gives you a level to fill to, and the filling is where it goes wrong. When a bake actually matters, scales are the fix and this is the shortcut.

The arithmetic happens in this browser tab, so nothing you type is transmitted or stored, and a tab that has already loaded keeps converting after the network is switched off. Three gaps are worth knowing before you rely on a line. The tablespoon here is the US one, exactly a sixteenth of that cup at 14.79 ml; there is no 20 ml Australian tablespoon and no 284 ml imperial cup in the table, so recipes written to either need converting by hand. An ingredient outside the 31 is not always refused, because the matcher falls back to the last word it recognises — cream cheese and cottage cheese are both weighed as shredded cheddar at 113 g per cup, and steel-cut oats as rolled oats at 90 g, neither of which is close. Only a phrase with no known word at all, such as 2 cups chopped onions, stops with an error. The ingredient actually applied is named in the result — in the table's Ingredient column, or in the summary line under the output when the all-units view drops that column — so read that name before trusting the number.

How to use it

  1. Type the amount, one per line. A bare number uses the menus. 1 1/2 cups flour, ½ tsp, 250 g sugar to cups and 3 tbsp to tsp are all read as written, and Load sample fills the box with five lines covering each style.
  2. Set From, To and the ingredient. The ingredient menu lists all 31 with their weight per US cup, so you can see that granulated sugar is 200 g and rolled oats are 90 g before converting anything. Whatever a line names beats the menus for that line.
  3. Check which ingredient the answer used. The ingredient menu is never empty — it starts on all-purpose flour — so a cups-to-grams conversion always applies some density. The summary beneath the output names the one it applied.
  4. Read the table, or expand it. Results come back as a table of the input, the ingredient and the result. Set To to All units (table) to list one amount in every unit at once, and Copy output takes the whole table as CSV.

Processing & privacy

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.

Common use cases

Baking an American recipe with scales

Cup measures for flour, sugar and butter become grams, so the bowl goes on the scale once instead of being packed, levelled and hoped over four separate times.

Swapping one salt for another

Table salt is 288 g per cup and Diamond Crystal kosher salt 137 g. Spoon for spoon they are more than twice apart, which is how a swap made without checking ruins a dish.

Butter in sticks, grams or ounces

A stick is a plain volume unit here, half a US cup, so it weighs whatever the ingredient menu is set to — one stick left on the flour default reads 62.5 g. Select or type butter and the same stick is 113.5 g at the table's 227 g per cup, so three-quarters of a stick becomes a number the European wrapper actually shows.

Halving or thirding a recipe

Awkward fractions turn into spoons you can measure: a third of a cup is exactly 16 tsp, and 3 tbsp comes back as 9 tsp, which divides by three without any mental arithmetic.

Questions

Does my recipe line leave this tab?
No. The unit table, the ingredient weights and the arithmetic all ship with the page and run in this browser tab, so nothing is transmitted, logged or stored. Once the page has loaded, an open tab goes on converting with the connection dropped.
Why does it ask which ingredient?
Because volume and weight are joined only by density. 250 ml of cocoa powder and 250 ml of honey fill the same jug and differ by about 270 g, so cups to grams has no answer until the ingredient is known. Spoons to millilitres, or grams to ounces, stay inside one dimension and ignore the ingredient entirely.
What if my ingredient is not on the list?
That depends on the words in it. Deliberate synonyms land correctly — cornflour reaches cornstarch, sultanas reach raisins, bicarb reaches baking soda. Anything else is matched on the last word the table knows, so sea salt is weighed as table salt and cream cheese as shredded cheddar, about half the weight a cup of cream cheese really is. Only a phrase with no recognised word — chopped onions, eggs, peanuts, anything sold by the piece — is refused outright, with a message naming what it could not resolve. So treat the ingredient printed in the result as the answer to this question.
How accurate is cups to grams?
As accurate as one reference figure can be. Each ingredient carries a single weight per US cup — 125 g for all-purpose flour, 200 g for granulated sugar, 220 g for packed brown sugar — taken from standard reference weights rather than from your bag or your cup. Liquids are close to exact because they level themselves; flour, cocoa and icing sugar depend on how they were scooped and can be a tenth out either way.
Which cup and which tablespoon does it use?
The US ones by default: a 236.5882365 ml cup, a 14.79 ml tablespoon and a 4.93 ml teaspoon. The 250 ml metric cup, the UK fluid ounce and the UK pint are separate entries you select or name. There is no 20 ml Australian tablespoon and no 284 ml imperial cup, so those have to be converted by hand.
Does oz mean the weight ounce or the fluid ounce?
The weight ounce, 28.349523125 g. The volume one is a separate unit written fl oz, with fl oz (UK) for the imperial 28.4130625 ml version — so 100 ml honey to oz answers a weight, printing 5.069206838 oz at the Automatic precision the tool starts on, or 5.07 with Precision set to 2 decimals.
Can it scale a recipe or set the oven?
No. It converts one amount per line and will not multiply a recipe by servings or read an ingredient list where words come before the number — a line has to start with a figure, and one that does not is reported by its line number. Oven settings are a different conversion: Temperature Converter does Fahrenheit to Celsius, and gas marks are in neither tool.

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