Cooking Conversion Chart and Calculator

How to convert cups, tablespoons and ounces

Knowing that a cup holds 16 tablespoons is the easy part. The awkward moment comes when a recipe asks for 7 tablespoons and you're standing over the bowl with a set of cups and a single spoon. So I built this around the question that follows the arithmetic: which of the things in your drawer should you pick up?

Enter any amount, choose its unit, and the result gives you the equivalent measures along with a plan for scooping it. Seven tablespoons becomes ¼ cup plus 3 tablespoons. A ⅓ cup stays a ⅓ cup, even if you arrived asking about 5⅓ tablespoons. You can type 1/3, 1 1/2, ⅔ or 0.75, or tap the fraction buttons if your phone keyboard makes a slash hard to reach.

How to measure with the spoons you own

Standard American sets usually have 1, ½, ⅓ and ¼ cup measures, so those start out ticked along with the common spoons. Untick anything you've lost or never owned and the plan rebuilds itself using only what remains. If you bought a ¾ cup or a ⅛ teaspoon, tick it and the plan will use it when that means fewer scoops.

The plan always aims for the fewest scoops, because every extra level-off is another chance to drift. When your set can't reach an amount exactly, you'll see the nearest one you can measure and how far off it is, in percent. I'd rather show a small, stated error than hand you a tidy fraction that quietly isn't true. A rounded ½ cup for 7 tablespoons, for example, is a 14% overshoot, and in a cake batter that's a real difference.

Is a cup 236.59 mL or 240 mL?

A US customary cup is 8 fluid ounces, about 236.59 mL. NIST Handbook 44 defines the measuring cup as 8 fluid ounces and prints it rounded as 237 mL. The FDA's guidance on household measures uses a different convention for nutrition labels, set out in 21 CFR 101.9: 1 cup means 240 mL, 1 tablespoon 15 mL, 1 teaspoon 5 mL and 1 fluid ounce 30 mL. NIST's kitchen table also lists rounded pairs and calls them approximate equivalents for home cooking.

Neither figure is wrong; they serve different jobs. The gap is about 1.4%, which won't matter in soup. I use the customary value for the conversion because that's what your American measuring cup holds, and I show the label figure on its own line so you can recognize it when a package disagrees with you.

Fluid ounces vs. ounces by weight

A fluid ounce measures space. An ounce on a scale measures weight. They only line up for water and ingredients close to it, so eight ounces of flour by weight comes nowhere near a cup. That's why the converter won't turn a weight into a volume until you name the ingredient. It would be easy to return a number anyway, and it would be the wrong number for nearly everything in your pantry.

Choose an ingredient and you'll also get grams and ounces by weight, using the King Arthur Baking ingredient chart. I'd spoon flour into the cup and level it, because packing it straight from the bag changes what the cup holds. If you bake often, I think weighing beats every cup in this table, and the cups to grams converter is the better starting point when weight is all you need. For a whole ingredient list rather than one line, use the recipe scaler.

How many sticks of butter are in a cup?

American butter is sold in sticks, and one stick is ½ cup, or 8 tablespoons. Choose butter as the ingredient and the result adds sticks to the list, so ¾ cup reads as 1½ sticks, 12 tablespoons and about 170 grams. It's the conversion I'd want on hand most often, since the wrapper's markings do the measuring for you.

Converting large amounts: quarts and gallons

Past 16 cups, a plan made of individual scoops stops being helpful, so the tool switches to quarts and suggests a large liquid measure. For anything that size, the small errors of repeated scooping add up, and a single large container is both faster and more even.