Recipe scaler with cups to grams
Scale a recipe to the number of servings you actually want, and convert each ingredient between volume and weight using its own density. A cup of flour and a cup of honey do not weigh the same, and a converter that treats them alike will ruin a cake.
Scale a whole recipe
The density table
Grams in one US customary cup, from the USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy release. Each row carries the food ID it came from, so you can check it.
| Ingredient | As measured | g per cup | g/ml | USDA ID |
|---|
Why this disagrees with most converters
Most online converters convert volume to weight once, using water, and apply that everywhere: one cup becomes 236 g whatever is in it. That is right for water, close enough for milk, and badly wrong for everything a baker cares about. A cup of all-purpose flour is 125 g. A cup of granulated sugar is 200 g. A cup of honey is 339 g. Using a single figure for all three is not a rounding error — it is nearly triple.
Where the numbers come from
Every weight here is the published portion weight from the USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy dataset, which is in the public domain. The table shows each food's ID so you can look up the same figure at the source. Other references differ a little — King Arthur puts a cup of all-purpose flour at 120 g rather than 125 — because how you fill the cup changes the answer by more than the sources differ from each other.
Sifted, spooned, dipped, packed
These words are not fussiness. Dipping the cup into the bag compacts the flour; spooning it in and levelling does not; sifting first aerates it. The spread between them is around fifteen per cent, which is the difference between a tender crumb and a dry one. Where the USDA publishes separate figures — packed and loose brown sugar, sifted and unsifted powdered sugar — this tool keeps them separate rather than averaging them into one misleading number.
Which cup?
A US customary cup is 236.588 ml. The cup used on US nutrition labels is rounded to 240 ml. Australia, and most metric recipes that still say "cup", mean 250 ml. That is a six per cent spread, and it is silent: nothing in a recipe tells you which one the writer meant. If a recipe is metric elsewhere, assume 250 ml.
What it does not do
It does not scale pan sizes, oven temperatures or baking times, and doubling a cake does not mean doubling its time in the oven. Yeast, leavening and salt also do not scale linearly once you go far past double. Treat large jumps as a starting point, not an answer.
FAQ
How many grams is a cup of flour?
125 g for all-purpose flour, by the USDA figure. Bread flour is 137 g and whole wheat is 120 g, so the answer changes with the flour as well as with how you fill the cup.
Why is my measurement different from the packet?
Packets quote a rounded serving, and brands differ. If you have a scale, the packet's own weight beats any table, including this one.
Can I scale by an awkward amount?
Yes. Enter any two serving counts and every line is multiplied by the ratio. Eggs are the difficult part, since two thirds of an egg is not something you can measure without beating one and weighing it.
Is anything sent to your servers?
No. The table ships with the page and the arithmetic runs in your browser.
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