Cooking Measurement Converter
Same value in every unit
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A cup is not a cup
The single most common kitchen conversion error is treating every cup as the same size. A US cup is 236.59 ml, a metric cup is 250 ml, and recipes rarely say which they mean. That is a 5.6% difference — invisible in a soup, obvious in a cake. Both are listed separately above rather than averaged into something that is wrong for everyone.
Volume is not weight
Cups measure space, grams measure mass, and the bridge between them is the ingredient. A cup of flour is roughly 120 g, caster sugar about 200 g, honey about 340 g, water 236 g. There is no universal cup-to-gram factor, which is why this converter does not pretend to offer one. For baking, weighing is simply more reliable than measuring by volume — professional recipes give grams for exactly this reason.
The ratios worth knowing by heart
- 3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon
- 16 tablespoons = 1 US cup
- 2 cups = 1 US pint
- 4 cups = 1 US quart
- 1 metric tablespoon = exactly 15 ml
UK measures are different again
A UK fluid ounce is 28.41 ml against the US 29.57, and a UK pint is 568 ml against the US 473 — a fifth larger. Old British recipes using imperial pints will come out badly short if measured with US equipment.
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Frequently Asked Questions
No, and this is the reason recipes go wrong. A US cup is 236.59 ml, a metric cup is 250 ml and an old UK cup was 284 ml. Both the US and metric cups are on the list above, kept separate rather than averaged, because a 6% difference is enough to ruin a cake.
Because a cup measures volume and a gram measures weight, and the relationship depends entirely on what is in the cup. A cup of flour is about 120 g, a cup of sugar about 200 g, a cup of water 236 g. Any tool that offers a single cup-to-gram number is guessing at your ingredient.
Not quite. A US tablespoon is 14.79 ml, the metric one used in most modern recipes is exactly 15 ml, and the old UK tablespoon was 17.76 ml. For most cooking the first two are interchangeable; for baking and for medicine they are not.
Three, in both the US and metric systems. And sixteen tablespoons in a US cup, which is the other ratio worth memorising.
The US measures. American recipes are written in US cups and spoons, and using metric cups adds about 6% to every wet ingredient.
No. It is arithmetic done in your browser.