Recipe converter
Paste a whole ingredient list and get it back in grams. The one setting that matters is where the recipe came from: a cup and a tablespoon are different sizes in London, Sydney and Tokyo, so the converter asks the origin first and reads every line at that country's measures.
US cup 236.6 ml, tablespoon 14.8 ml, teaspoon 4.9 ml.
Converted from a United States recipe.
| Recipe line | In grams |
|---|---|
| 1 cup flour | 120 g |
| 3/4 cup sugar | 149 g |
| 1 stick butter | 113 g |
| 2 tablespoons cocoa | 10.8 g |
| 1 teaspoon salt | 6 g |
A weight marked estimated is our US cup scaled by volume, because nobody weighed that cup of that ingredient. Bulk goods do not scale by volume, so the ingredient pages leave those cells empty rather than print them. Here the line has to say something, and this is the honest version of something.
Why the origin changes the grams
Most recipe converters assume the American cup and stop there. That is the assumption this tool removes. The same word, cup, is 236.6 ml in the United States, 250 in Australia and New Zealand, 200 in Japan and 284 in a pre-metric British recipe: a cup of flour swings from 110 grams to 144 across those four, before anyone argues about how you filled it. The tablespoon splits the same way, 15 ml almost everywhere but 20 in Australia, and the teaspoon holds at 5. Setting the origin tells the converter which of those to use, and each line shows whether the weight was measured by an authority or estimated from the density.
Rice carries its own trap. A Japanese recipe counts rice in go, the 180 ml cup in the rice-cooker box, and a go of white rice weighs 150 grams by the Japanese tables, not the 141 that scaling a cup would give. Write go in a Japanese recipe and the converter uses the measured figure. The single-value converter handles one line at a time, the printable charts cover a cup of each ingredient, and the world measures pages explain the foreign units a recipe throws at you. Food bloggers can embed the converter in a recipe post.
Questions about converting a recipe
- How do I convert a British recipe?
- Almost always with the modern British origin, because a recipe published in Britain today is already in grams and millilitres and passes through untouched. The 284 ml imperial cup has its own origin, and it is for reprints of books written before Britain went metric. Pick it for a modern recipe and every cup of flour comes out 144 g instead of 120.
- How do I convert an Australian recipe?
- Set the origin to Australia, which changes two things at once. The tablespoon is 20 ml against everyone else's 15, and the 250 ml cup is weighed by Australian charts rather than New Zealand ones, so a cup of plain flour reads 150 g where a New Zealand book means 125. Same cup, same flour, two countries measuring.
- What does a Japanese cup mean in a recipe?
- The 200 ml kitchen cup for most ingredients, and the 180 ml go for rice. Pick Japan as the origin and write go where the recipe does, and a go of rice reads 150 grams, the figure the Japanese tables measured rather than the number a volume ratio predicts.
- Which ingredients does it know?
- The twenty this site measures, matched by the words recipes use: plain flour and all-purpose read as flour, caster and granulated as sugar, icing sugar as powdered sugar. A line it cannot place stays as written so you can see what it skipped.
- Are the gram weights exact?
- They are as exact as the authority behind them. Where a cup was measured, the tool uses that weight and marks it; where no one measured a particular cup of a particular ingredient, it estimates from the US density and says so on the line.
Sources
Cup and spoon volumes from NIST, the FDA labeling rules, Standards Australia and the Kagawa standard tables. Ingredient weights from King Arthur Baking, USDA FoodData Central, the New Zealand and Australian charts and the Japanese tables, the same figures the ingredient pages carry, each listed on the sources page.