Grams per Cup for Common Baking Ingredients: Flour, Sugar, Butter, Honey, and More

Conversion Chart

Values are typical, using the 'spoon and level' method for dry ingredients. Different brands, humidity, and sifting change the weight slightly. Some recipe sources use slightly different standards, from 113 g to 125 g for a cup of all-purpose flour, so follow the weights in a recipe when it provides them.

Why the Method of Measuring Matters

If you dip the cup into a bag of flour and scoop, the flour compacts, and you may get 140 to 150 grams per cup. If you spoon flour lightly into the cup and level it, you get about 120. If you sift first and then measure, it may be only 100 grams. A recipe that needs 2 1/2 cups (300 grams) could receive 350 to 375 grams when scooped, 17% to 25% more than intended. Excess flour makes baked goods dry, dense, and crumbly. Sugar and liquids are much more consistent, but brown sugar varies with how firmly it is packed.

Converting a Recipe to Weights

Take a recipe: 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour, 1 cup granulated sugar, 1 cup butter, and 1/2 cup brown sugar. In grams: flour 2.25 × 120 = 270 g, sugar 200 g, butter 227 g, brown sugar 0.5 × 213 = 107 g. The total weight is 804 g. Write the weights in the margin of your cookbook and use a scale with a tare function: place the bowl, press tare, add flour to 270, press tare, add the next ingredient. This saves dishes too. Convert small amounts (teaspoons of baking powder, salt, and spices) with measuring spoons, or with a precise scale to 0.1 g for professional-level work.

Water-based liquids can be measured by weight, since 1 mL weighs about 1 g: a cup of water is 237 g. Eggs average 50 g without the shell for a large egg (about 30 g white, 17 g yolk).

Baker's Percentages

Professionals express recipes as percentages of the flour weight. In a bread with 500 g flour, 350 g water, 10 g salt, and 5 g yeast, the hydration is 70%, salt 2%, and yeast 1%. This makes scaling easy: to bake twice as much, double all weights, and it makes comparing recipes straightforward. A dough with 75% hydration is wetter than one with 60%. Weighing opens up this precise language.

Buying a Scale

A digital kitchen scale costs $10 to $30. Choose one with a tare feature, a capacity of at least 5 kg (11 lb), and a resolution of 1 gram (0.1 gram for small quantities of yeast and spices). Keep it on a flat surface and check its calibration occasionally with a known weight, such as a nickel (5 g).