Cooking Unit Converter
Convert cooking measurements: cups, tablespoons, ml, oz, grams, and more.
About this tool
The Cooking Unit Converter handles all the measurement conversions you need in the kitchen. Convert between cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, fluid ounces, milliliters, liters, pints, quarts, and gallons for volume. For weight, convert between grams, ounces, and pounds. Enter an amount, select the source unit and target unit, and the result appears instantly. A built-in reference table lists common recipe equivalents such as '1 stick of butter = 8 tbsp = ½ cup = 113g' to make recipe scaling fast and accurate.
How to use
- 1 Enter the amount you want to convert in the Amount field.
- 2 Select the source unit from the From Unit dropdown.
- 3 Select the target unit from the To Unit dropdown.
- 4 The converted result appears instantly below.
- 5 Switch between Volume and Weight tabs to change measurement type.
- 6 Scroll down to the Reference Table for common recipe equivalents.
Why cooking conversions trip people up
Recipes are written in whatever units the author grew up with, and the kitchen is where US cups collide with metric grams and British "imperial" measures. A recipe that calls for "1 cup of flour" assumes a 236.588 ml US cup, but a UK recipe's cup may differ, and an Australian metric cup is 250 ml. Worse, cups measure volume while many ingredients are better measured by weight, and the relationship between the two depends entirely on what you are scooping. This converter handles the volume-to-volume and weight-to-weight maths exactly, and its reference table fills in the ingredient-specific gaps that pure unit conversion cannot. It runs entirely in your browser.
How the conversion works
Rather than store a separate factor for every pair of units, the tool normalises through a single base unit. For volume, everything converts to millilitres; for weight, everything converts to grams. To convert, it multiplies your amount by the source unit's base value, then divides by the target unit's base value. The volume factors it uses are:
| Unit | Millilitres |
|---|---|
| 1 teaspoon (tsp) | 4.92892 |
| 1 tablespoon (tbsp) | 14.7868 |
| 1 fluid ounce (fl oz) | 29.5735 |
| 1 cup | 236.588 |
| 1 pint (pt) | 473.176 |
| 1 quart (qt) | 946.353 |
| 1 gallon (gal) | 3785.41 |
These are US customary values. On the weight side, 1 ounce is 28.3495 g and 1 pound is 453.592 g. The result is rounded to six significant figures so you get a clean number rather than a long decimal tail.
A worked example
Convert 2 cups to millilitres. The tool multiplies 2 × 236.588 = 473.176 ml, which it would also tell you equals exactly 1 pint — confirming the familiar "2 cups = 1 pint" rule. Now convert that same 2 cups to tablespoons: it computes 473.176 ÷ 14.7868 ≈ 32 tablespoons, matching the kitchen fact that 1 cup = 16 tbsp. Because every conversion passes through the same millilitre base, the ratios always agree, and you can chain any two units in the volume group without error.
Why volume and weight are kept separate
The single most important thing to understand is that the converter will not turn cups into grams, and that is deliberate, not a limitation. Volume and weight are different physical quantities linked only by density, which changes per ingredient. One cup of all-purpose flour weighs about 120 g, but one cup of granulated sugar weighs about 200 g, and one cup of honey about 340 g — same volume, wildly different weight. A generic "cups to grams" converter would have to assume a density and would therefore be wrong for most ingredients. Instead, this tool keeps the unit maths exact and hands the density problem to a reference table built on real ingredient data.
Using the reference table
The reference panel lists the equivalences that depend on the ingredient or that bakers use constantly, such as:
- 1 stick of butter = 8 tbsp = ½ cup = 113 g = 4 oz — the conversion most US recipes assume without stating.
- 1 cup all-purpose flour ≈ 120 g and 1 cup granulated sugar ≈ 200 g — the two densities that cause the most baking failures when guessed.
- Volume identities like 3 tsp = 1 tbsp, 4 tbsp = ¼ cup, and 16 tbsp = 1 cup for quick mental scaling.
When a recipe gives flour in cups but your kitchen scale speaks grams, look the ingredient up in this table rather than asking the converter to bridge volume and weight for you.
Practical tips
- Weigh flour when baking. A cup of flour can vary by 20–30% depending on how packed it is. Using the table's gram equivalent and a scale is the single biggest accuracy upgrade in baking.
- Use the swap button to sanity-check. Convert cups to ml, then swap and convert back — if you don't land on your original number, you picked the wrong units.
- Mind US versus UK gallons and pints. This tool uses US customary measures. A UK pint is 568 ml, not 473 ml, so a British recipe's "pint of milk" is larger than the US value here.
- Scale whole recipes proportionally. To halve a recipe, convert each volume to ml first, divide by two, then convert back to a convenient unit — it avoids awkward fractions like "⅜ cup."
Common mistakes
The classic error is treating fluid ounces and weight ounces as the same thing. A fluid ounce is a volume (29.57 ml) and a weight ounce is a mass (28.35 g); they happen to be numerically close, which is exactly why people conflate them, but they only coincide for water-like densities. Keep them on the correct tab — Volume for fl oz, Weight for oz. The second frequent mistake is assuming a "cup" is universal; metric cups (250 ml) and US cups (236.588 ml) differ by about 5%, enough to matter in delicate bakes. When in doubt, convert to millilitres or grams, the unambiguous base units, and work from there.