Grams to Cups Calculator

About the Grams to Cups Calculator

Recipes from Europe, the UK and professional kitchens give ingredients in grams. If your kitchen has measuring cups but no scale, those recipes can look impossible to follow. The conversion depends on the ingredient: 300 grams of sugar fills about one and a half cups, but 300 grams of flour fills about two and a half.

This grams to cups calculator converts a weight into US cups for flours, sugars, butter, oil, liquids, cocoa, oats, rice and more. It gives the result as a decimal number of cups, as a combination of cups, tablespoons and teaspoons you can actually measure, and in metric cups and millilitres for Australian and Canadian measuring sets.

How to Use the Grams to Cups Calculator

Enter the weight in grams.

Choose the ingredient.

Read the result as decimal cups, or use the measuring breakdown.

How Grams Are Converted to Cups

  cups         =  grams ÷ weight of one cup of the ingredient
  millilitres  =  cups × 236.6
  metric cups  =  millilitres ÷ 250

The measuring breakdown rounds to the nearest eighth of a teaspoon and uses the standard relationships: 16 tablespoons to a cup and 3 teaspoons to a tablespoon.

Step-by-Step Example

300 grams of granulated sugar.

  One cup of sugar:   about 200 g
  Cups:               300 ÷ 200          =  1.5 cups
  To measure:         1 cup + 8 tbsp
  Metric:             355 ml = 1.42 metric cups

100 grams of all-purpose flour.

Handy Fractions of a Cup

| ¼ cup | 4 | 12 |

| ½ cup | 8 | 24 |

| ¾ cup | 12 | 36 | | 1 cup | 16 | 48 |

Knowing these makes it easy to build any amount from a basic set of measuring cups and spoons.

Converting Common Metric Amounts

Some weights come up again and again in recipes. For all-purpose flour, 100 grams is about four fifths of a cup, 250 grams about two cups and 500 grams about four cups. For granulated sugar, 100 grams is half a cup and 200 grams one cup. For butter, 100 grams is just under half a cup, or about 7 tablespoons, and a 250 gram block is a little over a cup.

When to Convert, and When Not To

Converting grams to cups works well for cooking — soups, stews, sauces, roasting vegetables — where a little more or less makes little difference. For baking, where the balance between flour, sugar, fat and liquid decides whether a cake rises or a dough holds together, converting to cups adds error. Two people measuring the same number of cups of flour can easily end up with weights 15% apart.

If you bake regularly from metric recipes, a digital kitchen scale is one of the cheapest and most useful tools you can buy. Until then, spoon dry ingredients into the cup and level them with a straight edge to get as close as possible to the weights used here.

Liquids Are Easier

For water and milk, grams and millilitres are almost the same: a gram of water is a millilitre, and milk is only slightly heavier. So 250 grams of milk is close to 245 ml, just over a US cup. Honey and syrups are much denser: 340 grams of honey is only one cup.

Converting Butter, Honey and Other Dense Ingredients

Dense ingredients convert very differently from flour. A 250 gram block of butter is only a little over one cup, while 250 grams of flour is two cups. Honey is denser still: 340 grams fills just one cup. Always choose the matching ingredient before converting, and for butter, remember that US sticks are marked in tablespoons on the wrapper, which is easier than packing a cup.

Metric Recipes and Oven Temperatures

Recipes written in grams usually give oven temperatures in Celsius, and sometimes for fan ovens. When converting a metric recipe for an American kitchen, remember to convert the temperature too: 180 °C is about 350 °F, and a fan oven usually needs about 20 °C less than a conventional one. Pan sizes are often given in centimetres as well, so check that your tin is close to the size the recipe expects.

Rounding Converted Amounts

Converted amounts rarely come out as neat fractions. For cooking, rounding to the nearest quarter or third of a cup is fine. For baking, keep a little more precision by using the tablespoon and teaspoon breakdown, which rounds to the nearest eighth of a teaspoon.

Keeping a Conversion Note

If you often bake the same metric recipes with cups, write the converted amounts on the recipe itself. After the first bake, adjust them if the result was too dry or too wet, and keep those tested figures for next time.

Understanding Your Result

Volume is the weight converted into US cups.

How to measure it gives a combination of cups, tablespoons and teaspoons.

In metric cups shows the amount in 250 ml cups and millilitres.

Weight per cup shows the density figure used for the ingredient.

Worth knowing gives tips for accurate measuring.

When Should You Use This Calculator?

Following a metric recipe with US measuring cups.

Baking without a scale.

Converting a British or European recipe for American readers.

Checking how much an ingredient a pack will make.

Portioning rice, oats or pasta by weight.

Common Mistakes

Assuming 100 grams is always the same number of cups.

Scooping flour, which packs in too much.

Using US cups for an Australian recipe, or the reverse.

Converting baking recipes when a scale would be more accurate.

Rounding too early when several ingredients are converted.