Tool
Ingredient Converter
Convert any ingredient between grams, cups, ounces, milliliters, and tablespoons — density-aware, so a cup of flour and a cup of sugar convert correctly.
Ingredient Converter
120.0
Grams
4.23
Ounces
1.000
Cups
16.00
Tablespoons
48.00
Teaspoons
236.6
Milliliters
Most online conversion charts apply one blanket number — often "cup = 240g" or some other rounded average — to every ingredient a recipe could call for. That number is wrong for almost everything except water. Flour, sugar, cocoa powder, rolled oats, and chopped walnuts all pack into a measuring cup at different densities, so treating them as interchangeable weights quietly shifts the ratios a recipe depends on.
This tool sidesteps that by keying every conversion to the specific ingredient you pick from a list of ingredients with a real, sourced grams-per-cup figure (King Arthur Baking's published weight chart and USDA FoodData Central — see the Methodology page). Select an ingredient, enter an amount in whichever unit your recipe or your scale gives you, and it converts to grams, ounces, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and milliliters using that ingredient's actual density.
It's built for the moment a US recipe gives you cups and your kitchen scale only reads grams, or a European recipe hands you grams and your measuring cups are marked in cups — the two most common places a home cook loses accuracy without realizing it.
How the Ingredient Converter works
Every ingredient in the converter carries a gramsPerCup figure — the weight of one US cup (236.588 ml) of that ingredient, measured the way professional bakers measure it (spooned into the cup and leveled with a knife, not scooped and packed, which over-measures flour by up to 20%).
From that one density figure, the tool derives every other unit mathematically: ounces are grams divided by 28.3495, tablespoons are cups multiplied by 16, teaspoons are cups multiplied by 48, and milliliters are cups multiplied by 236.588. Enter a value in any supported unit and the tool works backward to grams first, then forward to every other unit, so the numbers always agree with each other regardless of which unit you started from.
If an ingredient has no reliable published density — most raw meat and seafood, which is conventionally sold and measured by weight rather than volume — it's left out of this tool's ingredient list entirely rather than assigned a made-up cup figure. Those ingredients get weight-only framing on their dedicated pages instead.
Worked example: converting 2½ cups of all-purpose flour
All-purpose flour weighs 120g per cup (spooned and leveled). For 2.5 cups, the tool multiplies 2.5 × 120 = 300g. From there it converts to ounces (300 ÷ 28.3495 ≈ 10.58 oz) and to milliliters (2.5 × 236.588 ≈ 591.5 ml).
Compare that to granulated sugar: 2.5 cups of sugar is 2.5 × 200 = 500g — 200g more than the same volume of flour. A recipe that swapped one for the other by volume alone (a common mistake when converting between a US and a metric-forward recipe) would be off by nearly two-thirds of a cup's worth of weight, which is exactly the kind of error that turns a cake dense or a cookie flat.
Edge cases this tool handles correctly
- Ingredients with no cup measure
- Raw meat, poultry, and seafood are sold and measured by weight, not volume, so they're excluded from this tool's dropdown rather than given a fabricated cup figure — use the weight-unit conversions on that ingredient's own page instead.
- Spices and other teaspoon-scale ingredients
- Ground cinnamon, baking powder, and similar ingredients technically have a mathematically valid cup weight, but nobody's kitchen actually needs that much of something this concentrated in one go — those ingredients carry an on-page note flagging the cup figure as a reference extrapolation, not a realistic recipe quantity.
- Packed vs. spooned measurement
- Brown sugar is the one common exception to the spoon-and-level convention — it's conventionally measured PACKED, and its 213g-per-cup figure reflects that. Using a spooned, unpacked cup of brown sugar will under-measure the actual amount a recipe expects.
Frequently asked questions
Why does this tool need me to pick a specific ingredient instead of just entering cups and grams?
Because cups and grams aren't a fixed ratio — they depend entirely on how dense the ingredient is. A generic cups-to-grams converter has to guess or average, and that guess is wrong for most ingredients most of the time.
What if my ingredient isn't in the list?
The list is bounded to ingredients with a real, sourced density figure. If an ingredient isn't listed, it's because no reliable cup-weight source was found for it — check the ingredient's own page, which explains why (e.g. it's conventionally sold by weight, like meat).
Is the spooned-and-leveled convention what my recipe actually means?
For the overwhelming majority of US baking recipes, yes — it's the professional and most widely taught convention. The one common exception on this site is brown sugar, which is conventionally packed; that's noted on its own conversion page.
Does this tool send my data anywhere?
No — the conversion math runs entirely in your browser using the bundled density table. Nothing you enter is sent to a server.