Cooking Converter

There is one fact behind this whole tool: a cup is a volume and a gram is a mass, so converting between them is impossible without knowing what is in the cup. One cup of flour is about 125 g. One cup of granulated sugar is 200 g. One cup of honey is 340 g, and one cup of cocoa powder is 85 g — a four-fold spread between the lightest and heaviest common ingredients.

That is why most "cups to grams" converters are wrong. They pick a single number, usually water's, and apply it to everything. In cooking that gives you an odd result; in baking, where the ratio of flour to fat to liquid is what makes the thing work at all, it gives you a brick. Every conversion here goes through a named ingredient, and the tool returns nothing rather than guessing when it does not know.

A second problem sits underneath the first: cups are not one size. A US customary cup is 236.6 ml, a US legal cup — the one on nutrition labels — is 240 ml, and a metric cup in Australia and New Zealand is 250 ml. That is a 6% error before density is considered. Tablespoons are worse: 14.8 ml in the US, 15 ml metric, and 20 ml in Australia, so an Australian tablespoon of baking powder is a third more than an American one. All of these are listed separately rather than averaged into one.

Flour deserves its own note. A cup of all-purpose flour weighs anywhere from 120 g to 145 g depending purely on how it got into the cup — scooping compacts it, spooning and levelling does not. 125 g is the spoon-and-level figure most modern recipe sites standardise on, and it is what this uses.

A kitchen scale removes every problem described above at once. There is no ambiguity about how packed the cup was, whose cup it is, or which country's tablespoon a recipe meant. Professional and most modern recipes give weights for exactly this reason.

It is also faster in practice. Weighing four ingredients into one bowl on a tared scale uses one piece of equipment and no washing up, against four measuring cups and a lot of levelling.