Cooking Measurement Converter

UK recipes use a mix of metric and imperial, leaning on grams and millilitres but keeping ounces and pints in places, while American recipes rely on cups and tablespoons for everything, dry ingredients included. This converter translates between cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, millilitres, fluid ounces, grams and ounces for common cooking ingredients, which is exactly what you need the moment a recipe crosses the Atlantic.

Volume to weight is the awkward part, because the answer depends entirely on what is in the cup. A cup of flour weighs approximately 125 g, a cup of sugar approximately 200 g and a cup of butter approximately 227 g. The tool adjusts for ingredient density rather than treating a cup as a fixed weight. Following one conversion through, 2 US cups of plain flour comes to roughly 250 g, which is also 473 ml, 32 US tablespoons or about 8.8 oz.

The units themselves diverge as well. A US cup is 237 ml, while the UK cup, rare in modern recipes, is 284 ml. A US tablespoon is 14.79 ml, near enough to 15 ml, whereas the official UK tablespoon is 17.7 ml. A UK fluid ounce is 28.41 ml against 29.57 ml in the US, and a UK pint is 568 ml against a US pint of 473 ml. Those small gaps compound across a long ingredient list, which is why weighing dry ingredients in grams gives the most dependable baking.

Everyday kitchen measures are easier to hold in your head. A teaspoon is 5 ml, a dessertspoon 10 ml and a tablespoon 15 ml. A mug holds 250-300 ml, wine glasses come in 125 ml, 175 ml and 250 ml, and a bottle of wine is 750 ml. A tin of tomatoes is 400g and a pat of butter 25g. By weight, a tablespoon of flour is 8g, of sugar 12g and of salt 18g. Heaped or level changes the result noticeably in baking, though a soup or a stew will forgive you.

Gas marks map onto degrees in a fixed ladder. Gas Mark 1 is 140°C, then 2 is 150°C, 3 is 160°C, 4 is 180°C and the setting most baking assumes, 5 is 190°C, 6 is 200°C, 7 is 220°C, 8 is 230°C, and 9 is 240°C. A fan oven sits 20°C below each of those figures because moving air cooks faster, so reduce any conventional recipe by 20°C. Allow the oven 10-15 minutes to come up to heat, and treat the dial with some suspicion, since most run 10-20°C off their setting and only a separate thermometer will say which way. An AGA behaves differently again, with fixed ovens for roasting at 240°C, baking at 180°C, simmering at 140°C and warming at 70°C.

Ingredient density explains why cup measures cause so much trouble. One US cup, 237 ml, holds 125g of flour, 200g of granulated sugar, 213g of packed brown sugar, 227g of butter, 200g of rice, 95g of oats, 80g of cocoa powder, 244g of milk, 340g of honey or 218g of oil. The same volume therefore spans everything from 80g to 340g depending on what goes into it. Even the flour figure is unstable, since scooping straight from the bag rather than spooning it in shifts the weight by 20-30%, and sifting leaves cake flour 5-10% lighter. Bread flour should never be sifted, because the protein structure depends on it. British recipes sidestep the whole problem by working in weight.

A few British ingredient conventions catch people out when they move between recipe books. Self-raising flour is plain flour with baking powder mixed through, at 1tsp of baking powder per 100g of flour. Caster sugar dissolves faster than granulated, which is why cakes ask for it while granulated suits a more crystalline texture. Cream is sold by fat content, with double cream at 48%, whipping cream at 36% and single cream at 18%, so single will not whip. American heavy cream matches UK whipping cream, and American light cream matches single. Butter is assumed unsalted in baking and salted in cooking. Eggs are graded by weight, with medium at 58-64g and large at 64-73g.