Cups to grams converter
Pick the ingredient, enter the amount, get grams — or cups from grams.
How many grams are in a cup of flour?
About 120 grams (4¼ ounces) of all-purpose flour, by King Arthur Baking's ingredient weight chart. Bread and cake flour are also 120 g a cup; whole wheat flour is 113 g.
How many grams are in a cup of sugar?
Granulated sugar is 198 grams a cup (7 ounces); packed brown sugar is 213 g, and confectioners' sugar only 113 g.
How many grams is a stick of butter?
113 grams — a stick is 8 tablespoons, ½ cup, or 4 ounces.
Why does a cup of flour weigh less than a cup of water?
A cup measures volume, and flour is full of air: 120 g of flour fills the same cup as 227 g of water. That is why cups-to-grams depends on the ingredient.
Why weigh ingredients instead of using cups?
Because a cup of flour weighs more when it is scooped and packed than when it is spooned in and leveled. Weights come out the same every time, which matters most in baking.
How many cups is 500 grams of flour?
4.17 cups of all-purpose flour, using 120 grams per cup. That is a little over 4 cups; for a bread recipe that lists 500 g, weigh it rather than counting scoops.
How many ingredients does the converter cover?
26 common baking and cooking ingredients, from flours and sugars to dairy, oils, nuts and chocolate chips. Each value is a published weight for a standard cup, and the converter scales it to any other measure: tablespoons, teaspoons, fluid ounces or milliliters.
Why one cup is a different weight for every ingredient
A cup measures volume, and grams measure mass, so the conversion depends on how densely the ingredient packs. A cup of water is 227 grams and a cup of granulated sugar 198 grams, while a cup of all-purpose flour is only 120 grams, because flour is full of air. The converter stores the weight of one cup of each ingredient and scales it by the measure you choose, using the exact relationships between teaspoons, tablespoons and cups.
Worked example: converting a recipe
A recipe calls for 2½ cups of all-purpose flour, ½ cup of granulated sugar and 1 stick of butter. By the King Arthur chart the flour is 2.5 × 120 = 300 g, the sugar ½ × 198 = 99 g and the butter 113 g. A tablespoon of granulated sugar is 12.4 g, so a recipe given as 4 tablespoons of sugar is 50 g. One cup of flour is 4.23 ounces, the 4¼ ounces bakers quote.
Common mistakes
Assuming that all cups of dry goods weigh the same is the first. The second is measuring flour by scooping the cup into the bag, which packs it and makes the cup heavier than a spooned and leveled one; the chart's 120 g is for the spoon-and-level method. Another is using the weight of one brand's chart for a different product, such as a coarse sea salt for fine table salt, whose volumes differ. When a recipe gives both cups and grams, trust the grams.
Sources: King Arthur Baking Company, Ingredient Weight Chart (grams per cup for each ingredient); US volume relationships from NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8. Related: cooking measurement converter, butter converter, baker's percentage calculator and recipe scaler.