Cooking Measurement Converter

Type a quantity and unit, pick what you want it converted to, and the converter handles the math. Cups to milliliters, tablespoons to grams (with a density lookup for common ingredients), Fahrenheit to Celsius for oven temperatures — the usual recipe-translation friction.

For weight conversions, ingredient density matters. A cup of flour weighs about 120 grams; a cup of sugar weighs 200. The converter asks what ingredient you're measuring before it gives you a gram figure, since 'cup' is a volume and 'gram' is a mass and pretending otherwise gives you broken cookies.

Volume-to-volume conversions (cups to ml, tsp to tbsp) don't need an ingredient — those are pure math.

The density table lives in the tool. Common ingredients get curated values: all-purpose flour at ~120 g/cup (spooned, not scooped), granulated sugar at 200, brown sugar packed at 220, butter at 227, honey at 340, cocoa powder at 100. These come from common pastry references and match what most US recipe development uses. European bakeries often use slightly different conventions — French recipes assume scooped flour at ~140 g/cup, which is why a literal translation can throw off proportions by 15%.

Worked example: a recipe asks for 2 cups of flour and 1 cup of sugar. Run the converter for each. 2 cups all-purpose flour = 240g. 1 cup granulated sugar = 200g. Now your kitchen scale (which beats any measuring cup for accuracy) reads the target weights directly. Honey is the trap — 1 cup honey = 340g, not 240g, because honey is denser than water. Volume-baked recipes that scale up by tripling sometimes break here because honey doesn't scale linearly the way flour does.

Where it gets you wrong: humidity-sensitive ingredients. Brown sugar's weight per cup depends on how packed it is, swinging 20% from loose to firmly packed. Powdered sugar varies by sifted vs unsifted by about 25%. The table assumes the most common convention but a recipe that emphasizes 'firmly packed' or 'sifted' is signaling the conversion factor matters more than usual. When in doubt, weigh once on a kitchen scale and trust the gram value forever after.

For sourdough and bread baking specifically, weight beats volume by a wide margin. Hydration percentage (water weight ÷ flour weight) is the foundational variable, and you can't compute hydration from cups because flour density swings 15-25% based on packing. Pro-style bread recipes give every ingredient in grams for this reason. Run the converter once to translate volume-based recipes into weights, then save the gram values and never measure that recipe by volume again.