Kitchen Measurement Conversion Chart
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Converting between volume measurements like cups and tablespoons is pure arithmetic, but converting volume to weight in grams depends entirely on the ingredient, since a cup of flour and a cup of honey weigh completely different amounts. This chart covers both: fixed volume-to-volume conversions that never change, and the approximate gram weights for the ingredients home bakers convert most often.
Volume-to-volume conversions (always exact)
1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons = 15 milliliters. The building block for most small-quantity conversions in a recipe.
1 cup = 16 tablespoons = 48 teaspoons = 237 milliliters (240ml is commonly used as a rounded figure). The standard US cup measurement most American recipes are written around.
1/2 cup = 8 tablespoons = 118.5 milliliters. A commonly needed half-measure for scaling recipes down.
1/4 cup = 4 tablespoons = 59 milliliters.
1 fluid ounce = 2 tablespoons = 29.6 milliliters. Useful for converting liquid ingredients sold by fluid ounce on the label.
1 US cup vs 1 metric cup: a US cup (237ml) is smaller than an Australian or UK metric cup (250ml), a small but real difference that compounds across a recipe with several cups of an ingredient, so international recipes calling for 'cups' are not always identical to US cup measurements.
Volume-to-weight for common baking ingredients (approximate)
All-purpose flour: 1 cup ≈ 120-125 grams, spooned and leveled rather than scooped directly from the bag, since scooping packs flour and can add 20-30 grams of extra flour per cup, throwing off a recipe's balance.
Granulated sugar: 1 cup ≈ 200 grams. Sugar packs more densely and consistently than flour, so the volume-to-weight relationship varies less between measuring techniques.
Brown sugar (packed): 1 cup ≈ 220 grams. Brown sugar is measured packed by convention, unlike most other dry ingredients, because its moisture content lets it compress meaningfully.
Butter: 1 cup ≈ 227 grams (2 sticks in US butter packaging); 1 tablespoon ≈ 14 grams. US butter sticks are usually marked with both tablespoon and cup lines, making this one of the easier ingredients to measure precisely without a scale.
Honey and other thick liquids: 1 cup ≈ 340 grams. Honey is notably denser than water or milk, which is why recipes converting between cup and gram measurements for honey specifically will look different from a simple 1 cup = 237 grams assumption.
Milk and water: 1 cup ≈ 240 grams, since both are close enough to water's density that the milliliter and gram figures are functionally interchangeable for kitchen purposes.
Why a kitchen scale beats cup measurements for baking
Baking is closer to chemistry than cooking, where small deviations in ratio noticeably change texture, so the flour example above, where scooping versus spooning can shift a cup by 20-30 grams, is exactly the kind of inconsistency a scale eliminates entirely. Weighing ingredients also makes a recipe reproducible across different people and different measuring cup brands, since a gram is a fixed unit while a 'cup' can vary slightly by both the tool and the technique used to fill it.
For recipes originally written in grams, a scale is effectively required for accuracy, while for recipes written in cups and spoons, using the same measuring tools consistently every time you bake a given recipe matters more than hitting an exact gram figure, since the recipe was likely tested and balanced around whatever technique its author used.