Cooking Conversion Chart

You're halfway into a recipe when it asks for 180 grams of flour and every measuring tool in your kitchen is marked in cups. Or the reverse — the recipe says two cups, your scale reads in grams, and the internet gives you four different answers about which is which.

Here's the whole thing on one page — volumes, weights, oven temperatures, and the one most charts leave out: what a cup of each ingredient actually weighs. There's a printable version at the bottom if you'd rather have it on the fridge than on a phone screen you keep waking up with floury hands.

Abbreviations, first

Recipes are inconsistent about this and it causes real damage. A lowercase tsp is a teaspoon. An uppercase Tbsp, or a bare capital T, is a tablespoon — three times larger. A lowercase t on its own means teaspoon. If a recipe uses a bare T and you read it as teaspoon, you're out by a factor of three, which is the difference between seasoned and inedible.

oz is ounces by weight. fl oz is fluid ounces, a measure of volume. They're not interchangeable except for water, where one fluid ounce happens to weigh about one ounce.

Volume

A US cup is 240 ml. A metric cup, used in Australia and parts of Europe, is 250 ml. A UK recipe written before the 1970s might mean an imperial cup, which is 284 ml. The difference rarely matters in a soup and matters a great deal in a cake.

Weight

American recipes often measure butter in sticks, which nobody outside the US sells. One stick is 8 tablespoons, ½ cup, 4 ounces, or 113 grams. Two sticks make a cup. The wrapper is usually marked in tablespoons, which is the fastest way to cut a precise amount without a scale.

Oven temperature

For a fan or convection oven, drop it by about 25°F or 20°C and start checking early. Fan ovens also run truer at the edges, so things brown faster at the sides of the tray than they would otherwise.

Cups to grams, by ingredient

This is the table people actually need, and it's the one most conversion charts leave out.

A cup measures space, not substance. A cup of flour and a cup of honey occupy the same volume and weigh almost three times apart. There is no single number that converts cups to grams, which is why the answers online disagree — they're not wrong, they're describing different ingredients.

Flour is the one that ruins things. Scooping the cup straight into the bag compacts it and can give you 150 grams where the recipe wanted 120 — a quarter more flour than intended, which is the difference between a tender crumb and a dry one. Spoon it into the cup and level the top with a knife, or weigh it.

The conversion nobody prints

There's one more adjustment every cook makes and no chart contains. Your oven runs hot. Your family thinks the recipe is under-salted. The roast that says ninety minutes needs a hundred and ten in your kitchen, and you found that out the hard way, twice.

Those are conversions too, and they're the only ones that are actually yours. They also disappear. You work them out over four or five attempts, cook something else for eight months, and start again from the printed number.

Writing them down at the moment you notice them is the whole trick — on the back of this chart, in the margin of the recipe, anywhere. It just has to be somewhere you'll find it the next time you make that dish.

Print it

The whole chart, on one page, in a format that survives a kitchen. No email required.

Common questions

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