How to Convert a Whole Recipe to Grams (and Why It Is Worth It)

The method

For each ingredient: multiply the cup amount by that ingredient's grams-per-cup figure.

Take a standard cake:

Original — Grams per cup — Converted

2½ cups all-purpose flour — 125 g — 313 g

1½ cups granulated sugar — 200 g — 300 g

1 cup butter — 227 g — 227 g

1 cup whole milk — 244 g — 244 g

2 tsp baking powder — — — 9.6 g

½ tsp salt — — — 2.9 g

The whole recipe now fits on one line of a scale display, and you can double or halve it without any fraction arithmetic at all.

The recipe scaler does exactly this for a pasted ingredient list, and the ingredient index has the grams-per-cup figure for every ingredient on the site.

What to convert, and what to leave

Convert:

Flour, sugar, and every other dry bulk ingredient — this is where the biggest errors live

Butter, oil and fats

Chocolate, nuts, dried fruit

Anything over about a quarter cup

Leave as it is:

Eggs, unless you are halving the recipe

Tinned goods, which are already sold by weight

Whole items — one onion, two bananas

Vanilla extract and similar, where a teaspoon is already precise enough

Salt and leaveners, arguably — though weighing these is worthwhile if you bake bread

The rule of thumb: convert anything where the measuring method could plausibly change the amount by more than a few percent.

The figures you will use most

Ingredient — Grams per cup

Cake flour — 120 g

All-purpose flour — 125 g

Bread flour — 130 g

Powdered sugar — 120 g

Granulated sugar — 200 g

Brown sugar (packed) — 220 g

Butter — 227 g

Water — 237 g

Whole milk — 244 g

Vegetable oil — 224 g

For spoons rather than cups, divide by 16 for tablespoons and 48 for teaspoons. A tablespoon of flour is 125 ÷ 16 = 7.8 g.

When the converted version does not work

This happens, and there is usually one explanation.

The author scooped. If a recipe developer filled their measuring cup by dragging it through the flour bag, their "cup" held 140–150 g, not the 125 g standard. Your converted recipe is then 10–20% short on flour, and the result is wetter and flatter than theirs.

The fix: add 10–15% more flour and try again. Then write down what worked, because that is now your version of the recipe and it is more accurate than the original.

Brown sugar was measured loose. If a recipe reads oddly sweet after converting, the author may have spooned brown sugar rather than packing it — about 145 g rather than 220 g.

Different flour. American all-purpose flour and British plain flour differ slightly in protein content. This affects texture more than quantity, but it is worth knowing when a converted recipe is close but not quite right.

Liquids: grams or millilitres?

Water weighs almost exactly 1 g per ml, so 250 ml of water is 250 g and the two units are interchangeable.

Milk is slightly heavier at about 1.03 g/ml. Oil is lighter at about 0.92. Honey is much heavier at about 1.44.

In practice, most people find it easiest to weigh the dry ingredients and measure liquids in a jug. There is no purity requirement here — use whichever is less annoying.

If you do want everything on the scale, the grams to millilitres converter has the density for each liquid on the site.

Writing it down properly

Once converted, record it somewhere you will find it again.

Write the grams in the margin of the cookbook, next to the cup amount. You keep both, and you can see at a glance which you used.

Note the date and anything you changed. "Oct — used 340 g flour, better" is worth more in six months than any amount of memory.

Note the pan and the actual bake time your oven needed. That is the other half of a reproducible recipe.

The payoff

Consistency. The same bake every time, because the amounts are actually the same every time.

Speed. One bowl on a scale, tare between ingredients. No stack of cups to wash.

Easy scaling. Multiplying grams is instant. Multiplying "1⅔ cups" by 1.5 is a puzzle.

Portability. A recipe in grams works in any country, with any set of cups, on any continent. Weight does not have national variants.

Troubleshooting. When a bake goes wrong, you can compare what you actually used against what worked last time. With cups you are comparing two guesses.

Start with one recipe you make often. Convert it, bake it, adjust it, write it down. Then do the next one. Within a few weeks the recipes you care about are all in weight, and the measuring cups go to the back of the drawer where they belong.

Use the recipe scaler to do the conversion in one paste, the universal converter for anything unusual, and the printable charts for the figures you will look up most.

Frequently asked questions

How do I convert a recipe from cups to grams?

Multiply each ingredient's cup amount by its grams-per-cup figure. A cup of flour is 125 g, so 2½ cups is 313 g. The recipe scaler on this site will do a whole ingredient list at once.

Which ingredients should I not bother converting?

Anything counted rather than measured — eggs, tins, whole vegetables — and anything where a spoonful is already precise enough, like vanilla extract.

What if my converted recipe does not come out the same?

Most often the original author scooped their flour rather than spooning it, so their cup weighed more than the standard 125 g. Add 10–15% more flour and try again, then write down what worked.

Do I need to convert liquids too?

Water and milk convert almost exactly — 1 ml is about 1 g. It is often easier to keep liquids in millilitres and weigh only the dry ingredients.

Is it worth converting a recipe I only make once?

Probably not. It pays off on the recipes you return to, where the time you spend once saves you from measuring cups every time after.