Cups to grams
| Ingredient | Grams | Ounces |
|---|---|---|
| Water | 237 | 8.4 |
| Plain flour | 125 | 4.4 |
| Bread flour | 130 | 4.6 |
| White sugar | 200 | 7.1 |
| Brown sugar, packed | 220 | 7.8 |
| Icing sugar | 120 | 4.2 |
| Butter | 227 | 8.0 |
| Oil | 218 | 7.7 |
| Honey | 340 | 12.0 |
| Rolled oats | 90 | 3.2 |
| Cocoa powder | 85 | 3.0 |
| Rice, uncooked | 185 | 6.5 |
Scooping a cup straight from the bag compacts the flour and can give 150 grams. Spooning it in lightly and levelling gives about 125. Sifting first gives closer to 110. That is a 35% spread on the single most important ingredient in most baking, and it is the reason serious baking recipes are written in grams and serious bakers own a scale.
A US cup is 236.588 ml of volume, so the weight depends entirely on what fills it. The same cup holds 90 g of rolled oats or 340 g of honey, close to four times the mass. Plain flour comes to about 125 g, white sugar 200 g and butter 227 g. There is no cups-to-grams factor to learn.
How to convert cups to grams
Everything on this page follows from one fact: a cup measures space, and a scale measures matter. Water makes the two look interchangeable, because a millilitre of it weighs a gram and so a cup of it weighs 236.6 g. Nothing else obliges. Oil is about 0.92 g per millilitre and comes to 218 g a cup. Honey is roughly 1.44 and comes to 340. Rolled oats are mostly air between flakes and manage 90. Reading a recipe that says "one cup" tells you the volume of the measure and nothing at all about the mass going into the bowl.
Flour is where this stops being trivia, and the interesting part is that the experts disagree. King Arthur Baking puts a cup of all-purpose flour at 120 g. The USDA’s food data puts it at 125, which is the figure used here. America’s Test Kitchen standardises on 5 ounces, about 142 g, because their house method dips the cup into the bag. Those are three careful American authorities describing the same ingredient, spread across eighteen per cent, and none of them is wrong. They are measuring different acts of filling a cup.
How you fill it is the whole variable. Scooping straight from the bag compacts the flour under the leading edge of the cup and can reach 150 g. Spooning it in loosely and levelling the top with a knife gives around 120 to 125. Sifting first drops it to about 110. That is a spread of a third on the ingredient that sets the structure of everything you bake, and it is why serious baking recipes are written in grams and why serious bakers own a scale. If a recipe gives you both cups and grams, the grams are what the author actually weighed.
Salt deserves its own warning, because the error there is a seasoning error rather than a texture one. Fine table salt packs to about 273 g a cup, roughly 6 g a teaspoon. Diamond Crystal kosher salt is a flake rather than a crystal and comes in near half that, around 2.8 g a teaspoon, with Morton kosher between the two at about 4.8. Swapping one for another by volume changes the salt in a dish by a factor of two, which is a good deal more noticeable than a slightly heavy cake.
What people use it for
- Following an American recipe with a European scale
- Converting a family recipe into grams once and never doing it again
- Working out what a third or three quarters of a cup weighs
- Checking a bag of flour against the cup measure a recipe assumed
- Converting a bread recipe so it can be scaled by percentage
- Substituting one salt for another without doubling the seasoning
- Costing an ingredient bought by weight against a recipe written by volume
Questions
It depends on the ingredient and on nothing else. Water is 237 g, flour about 125, sugar 200, butter 227, honey 340 and rolled oats 90.
About 125 g spooned and levelled, which is the figure used here. Scooping from the bag can give 150 or more, and sifting first drops it near 110.
Because they describe different ways of filling the cup. King Arthur says 120 g, the USDA says 125, and America’s Test Kitchen says 142 because they dip the cup into the bag. All three are careful measurements of different actions.
No, and there are four cups in circulation. A US customary cup is 236.588 ml, a metric cup is 250, an old imperial cup is 284.13, and the US legal cup used on nutrition labels is exactly 240.
It is the cup the FDA defines for nutrition labelling, at exactly 240 ml, chosen as a round number for calculating serving sizes. It is not the cup in your measuring set, which is 236.588.
Almost never in a kitchen. It is 1.4 per cent, well inside the variation from how you fill the cup. It matters when you are reading a label rather than baking.
Sixteen US tablespoons, or 48 teaspoons. The figures here use that convention, so a metric tablespoon of 15 ml or an Australian one of 20 will not line up.
Half a cup, 113 g, 4 ounces or 8 tablespoons. Two sticks make the 227 g cup, which is why butter is one of the few ingredients where the cup is genuinely reliable.
Because it is a solid block with no air in it. Anything packed as a block or poured as a liquid measures reliably by volume; anything made of separate particles does not.
Packed, which is what the 220 g figure assumes. Press it into the cup until it holds the shape when turned out. Loose brown sugar is closer to 145 g and no recipe means that.
Weigh them if you can, because a cup of honey is 340 g and most of the difficulty is getting it out of the cup. Oiling the measure first helps if you must use volume.
Not one for one. Diamond Crystal kosher runs about 2.8 g a teaspoon against roughly 6 for fine table salt, so the same spoon carries less than half the salt. Convert by weight or accept a dish twice as salty.
White granulated is 200 g. Icing sugar is only 120 because it is far finer and holds more air, and packed brown is 220.
They are the least reliable of all, at 100 g and 120 g a cup here, because the answer depends on how coarsely you cut them. Treat those two as approximations even by the standards of this page.
Coincidence rather than anything meaningful. Both land at 120 g a cup, from completely different combinations of particle density and packing.
Enter 0.33 and read the grams, or use the dedicated ⅓ cup measure if you have one. Thirds are the fractions people most often estimate and most often get wrong.
Once, carefully, and then write the grams on the card. Cup measures drift with whoever is holding the cup, and a recipe recorded in grams is the same recipe in ten years.
Speed and habit. A cup needs no scale and no washing up, which matters far more for a stew than for a cake.
No. A standard mug holds 300 to 400 ml, half again as much as a measuring cup, and using one is the single most common reason an American recipe fails in a European kitchen.