Cooking Measurement Converter
Convert cups, tablespoons, millilitres and ounces, turn cups into grams for 40 common ingredients, translate oven temperatures between °C, °F and gas mark, and rescale a whole recipe.
= 237 mL exactly
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Spoon sizes are not universal
A US tablespoon is 14.79 mL, a metric one is 15 mL — close enough to ignore. An Australian tablespoon is 20 mL, a full 35% larger. In a recipe calling for 3 tbsp of baking powder that difference is real.
Why a cup of flour is not a fixed amount
A cup measures volume, but baking is chemistry that runs on mass. Flour is compressible, so how it gets into the cup decides how much is in there. Spooning it in loosely and levelling the top gives about 125 g. Dipping the cup straight into the bag and scooping packs it down to 145–155 g — up to a quarter more flour than the recipe intended.
That is the single biggest reason a cake comes out dry or a dough comes out stiff when the recipe worked fine for someone else. Nothing about the recipe changed; the measuring did. Every gram figure on this page assumes the spoon-and-level method, which is what US recipe developers standardise on.
Weighing sidesteps the problem entirely. A €10 kitchen scale removes the variable, cuts the washing up, and makes a recipe reproducible for anyone who reads it — which is why professional and European recipes are written in grams in the first place.
Four different cups are in circulation
| Cup | Volume | Where you meet it |
|---|---|---|
| US customary | 236.6 mL | 8 US fluid ounces. The default in American cookbooks and blogs. |
| US legal | 240 mL | Defined by the FDA for nutrition labels. Rounded, and 1.4% larger. |
| Metric | 250 mL | Australia, New Zealand, and most metric-country recipe writing. |
| Japan / Korea | 200 mL | The standard cup sold with rice cookers across East Asia. |
| Imperial | 284.1 mL | Historic UK cup — half an imperial pint. Rare in modern recipes. |
The spread from 200 to 284 mL is 42%. For stock or milk it rarely matters; for flour, sugar, or leavening it changes the result. When a recipe does not say which cup it means, the author's country is the best clue.
Conversions worth memorising
3 tsp
= 1 tbsp
16 tbsp
= 1 cup
4 tbsp
= ¼ cup
8 fl oz
= 1 cup (US)
2 cups
= 1 pint (US)
4 cups
= 1 quart
1 stick butter
= ½ cup · 113 g
1 cup water
= ≈ 237 g
- Fluid ounces are not ounces. One is volume, the other is weight. They only coincide for water, and only in the US system.
- US and imperial pints differ. 473 mL versus 568 mL — a 20% gap that quietly wrecks scaled-up drink recipes.
- Salt is the worst offender. A cup of table salt weighs 292 g; the same cup of Diamond Crystal kosher salt weighs 145 g. Swapping them by volume doubles the salt.
- Butter has its own unit. A US stick is ½ cup, 8 tbsp, or 113 g, and the wrapper is printed with tablespoon marks so you can cut it without measuring.
Oven dials, gas marks, and fan settings
British recipes still use gas marks, a scale that runs from ¼ to 10. From gas mark 1 upward each step adds 25 °F, which is why the Celsius column has uneven gaps — it is a Fahrenheit ladder translated after the fact.
A fan (convection) oven circulates air, so heat reaches the food faster at the same air temperature. Set it about 20 °C lower than a conventional recipe and start checking 10–15% earlier. Recipes that give both numbers — "180 °C / 160 °C fan" — are applying exactly this rule.
Domestic ovens are also routinely off by 10–20 °C, and they swing as the thermostat cycles. A cheap oven thermometer tells you what your oven actually does, which matters far more than converting the number precisely.
What does not scale linearly
Doubling a recipe is safe for the ingredient list and unsafe for everything else. Volume grows faster than surface area, so a doubled batter in a bigger pan is deeper, heats more slowly at the centre, and needs a lower temperature for longer — often 15 °C down and 25–50% more time.
- Pan area, not pan count. A 9-inch round pan has 64 in² of base; a 13×9 has 117 in². That is 1.8×, not 2×.
- Leavening. Baking soda and powder are usually scaled a touch under the multiplier — around 0.85× the scaled amount when tripling or more.
- Salt and spice. Perceived intensity is not linear. Scale to about 0.75× of the arithmetic result, taste, then adjust.
- Alcohol and extracts. Vanilla, almond extract, and liquor concentrate as they cook; scale conservatively.
- Pan-frying and searing. Cannot be scaled at all — crowd the pan and the food steams instead of browning. Cook in batches.