"A cup of flour" in a recipe — how many grams is that? The answer depends on the ingredient: a cup of flour and a cup of sugar weigh different amounts because they have different densities. Let's break it down and give you a conversion table.
Why the weight of a cup differs
A cup, a spoon, a milliliter — these are units of volume, while grams are a unit of weight. Density is what connects them. Light flour takes up the same volume but weighs less than dense sugar or honey. That's why there's no single "1 cup = N grams" figure — it depends on the specific ingredient.
Table: a 250 ml cup
Approximate values for a standard 250 ml cup (for a 200 ml cup, multiply by roughly 0.8):
- Wheat flour — approx. 150 g
- Sugar — approx. 200 g
- Powdered sugar — approx. 140 g
- Salt — approx. 300 g
- Rice — approx. 210 g
- Cocoa powder — approx. 130 g
- Honey — approx. 355 g
- Water / milk — approx. 250 g
Spoons
- Tablespoon: flour approx. 9 g, sugar approx. 12 g, salt approx. 18 g, honey approx. 21 g.
- Teaspoon: flour approx. 3 g, sugar approx. 4 g, salt approx. 6 g.
These figures are approximate: weight depends on how finely something is milled, its moisture content, and whether the spoon is heaped or level.
Get an exact number in a second
Instead of memorizing tables, use the cooking calculator: pick an ingredient, enter the amount in cups or spoons, and get the weight in grams (or the other way around). The same tool also converts oven temperature between °C, °F, and gas marks, and rescales a recipe to a different number of servings.
A tip
For baking, weight is more precise than volume: 150 g of flour is always 150 g, while everyone's "cup" is a bit different. If you have a kitchen scale, go by grams; the calculator helps you translate the units in a recipe into something you can actually measure.