Cups to grams, ounces and Fahrenheit: how to convert them

How many grams is a cup?

That depends on what is in the cup. A cup measures volume, 240 ml, and not weight, so a cup of flour weighs far less than a cup of honey. That is why there is no single conversion from cups to grams, only one per ingredient:

For half or a quarter of a cup you divide by two or four, and 1½ cups of flour is about 190 g. It works the other way round too: 250 g of flour is about 2 cups. In a recipe in Smaquli the app rounds to a number you can measure out, so you see 125 g of flour and not 127 g. Treat the table as a good estimate and not as a set of scales: flour that you press into the cup weighs more than flour you spoon in loosely.

The difference lies in the ingredient itself. Flour is airy and honey is syrupy and heavy, and the same 240 ml goes into both. If your ingredient isn't listed, fill a cup once, weigh it and write the weight next to the recipe. Then you never have to look it up again. In a soup a wonky cup hardly matters, but in a cake or bread it does, because too much flour makes it dry and dense. So bake by weight when you can.

How many ml is a cup, and what is a spoon?

A cup is 240 ml, half a cup is 120 ml, a third is 80 ml and a quarter is 60 ml. A quarter cup is 4 tablespoons and half a cup is 8, which is 60 ml and 120 ml. Smaquli shows a tbsp (tablespoon) as el and a tsp (teaspoon) as tl, because the app is in Dutch for now. Watch out for abbreviations: in some recipes a capital T means tablespoon and a lower-case t means teaspoon, and that is a factor of three. With liquids you also see fluid ounces and pints: 1 fl oz is 29.57 ml and 1 pint is 473 ml.

But a cup is not the same size everywhere. The American cup is really about 237 ml, in Australia a cup is 250 ml, and a British pint, at 568 ml, is bigger than the American one of 473 ml. Smaquli uses 240 ml per cup and 473 ml per pint. For a few cups that makes little difference.

How many grams is an ounce, a pound or a stick of butter?

An ounce (oz) is 28.35 g, a pound (lb) is 453.6 g and a stick of butter is 113 g. A pound is 16 ounces and a stick of butter is 4 ounces.

Watch out for the difference between ounces and fluid ounces. An ounce is a weight and a fluid ounce is a volume, even though the words look alike. 8 oz of flour is about 227 g, which is almost 1.8 cups, while 8 fl oz of milk is about 1 cup.

How many degrees Celsius is 350 degrees Fahrenheit?

350 °F is 175 °C, and that is the standard temperature in many American baking recipes. Subtract 32 from the temperature in Fahrenheit and divide the result by 1.8. That gives 176.7 degrees, and Smaquli rounds to 5 degrees, because nobody sets an oven that precisely. Take 425 °F: 425 minus 32 is 393, divided by 1.8 is 218.3, and that becomes 220 °C. The other way round, multiply degrees Celsius by 1.8 and add 32: 180 °C is 356 °F, so roughly 350 °F.

How do you convert a whole American recipe in one go?

Convert the list in a fixed order: liquids to ml first, then dry ingredients to grams, then sticks and ounces to grams, and the oven last. Suppose a recipe says this:

The last column is rounded to what you can measure out, as Smaquli does too. It is an example list to show the order, not one of our recipes. If you then want to cook the recipe for more or fewer people, How to scale a recipe explains how.

Can you have it calculated for you?

Yes. Enter an amount below, and the converter turns cups, ounces, pounds and degrees Fahrenheit into metric for you.

How does Smaquli convert an American recipe for you?

Paste the link to a recipe in English, and Smaquli translates it into Dutch and converts it to grams, ml and °C. Every ingredient is split into quantity, unit and name. You always see the result in a check screen first, so you can see whether 2 cups of flour has become what you expected.

Many banana bread recipes use cups. Our banana bread is in grams and °C, like every recipe in Smaquli. The app is in Dutch and metric for now, so you always save a Dutch recipe in grams, ml and °C, even if it comes from an English site. English is on its way. There is more on Save recipes.