Cooking from a metric recipe
Pages in this list checked · How we check
Cooking from a metric recipe takes 5 of the pages on this site, not one. Grams to cups is not one number: 400 g of flour and 400 g of sugar are different volumes, and a scooped cup of flour weighs more than a spooned one. These handle the ingredient and the method rather than a single factor. Each page in the list computes its own figure from a published formula and prints the working, so the whole sequence can be checked rather than trusted.
- 1Grams to Cups Converter90 ingredients, spooned, dipped or packedCalculator
- 2Temperature ConverterOven temperatures both waysCalculator
- 3grams to ouncesStraight weight, when the ingredient does not matterConversion
- 4milliliters to US fluid ouncesLiquids, where volume is volumeConversion
- 5Cups to Grams ChartThe whole table at onceChart
What goes wrong on this job
A cup is a volume and flour is mostly air
One cup of all-purpose flour is 120 g spooned, 148.8 g dipped and 159.6 g packed — a third between the extremes. Sugar does not move at all: 198 g however you fill it, because the grains are hard and already packed.
The oven number is a different scale, not a different unit
Fahrenheit has an offset as well as a factor, so there is no single number to multiply by. Subtract 32 before multiplying by 5/9, not after — doing it the other way is wrong by about 18 degrees at room temperature.
Fluid ounces are not ounces, and not the same everywhere
A US fluid ounce is 29.5735 ml and an imperial one 28.4131 ml, a 4% gap. A UK recipe asking for 10 fl oz means 284 ml; an American one means 296 ml.
One US cup, spooned and levelled
| Ingredient | Weight |
|---|---|
| All-purpose flour | 120 g |
| Bread flour | 120 g |
| Whole wheat flour | 113 g |
| Granulated sugar | 198 g |
| Cocoa powder | 84 g |
| Rolled oats | 89 g |
Typical figures for orientation. Every one is recomputed by the calculators above from the dimensions you actually have.
What the figures rest on
Every quantity above is computed by one of the calculators in the list, from these published standards.