How We Calculate Our Conversions

Every ingredient on this site has its own density — its weight in grams for one US cup (236.588 mL) — sourced from standard, widely-published baking references, primarily the King Arthur Baking ingredient weight chart and USDA FoodData Central. We use King Arthur's spoon-into-the-cup-and-level method as our default, since it's the technique described in each ingredient's measuring notes.

Where an ingredient is commonly measured a different way — packed brown sugar, sifted powdered sugar, melted butter — we list that as an alternate density alongside the default figure.

These are standard reference values, not individually lab-measured for this site. Actual weight can vary by ±10% or more depending on technique (scooped vs. spooned), whether an ingredient is sifted, brand and moisture content, and humidity. For baking where precision matters — bread, pastry, anything with a tight hydration ratio — weighing your ingredients on a kitchen scale is always more accurate than converting from a recipe written in cups.

Our conversion math itself (grams ↔ cups, and the tablespoon, teaspoon, milliliter, ounce, and pound equivalents shown alongside it) is exact — it's the same formula used by both the live calculator and every pre-generated table on this site, so the numbers never drift between the two.