How Many Tablespoons in a Third Cup?

How do you measure ⅓ cup with tablespoons?

Five tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon. Not 5 and not 6. Stopping at 5 leaves you 6.25% short, and going to 6 puts you 12.5% over, which is the kind of rounding that gets blamed on the oven later. Five and a half tablespoons feels like a fair compromise and comes in about 3% over: I'd accept that in soup and turn it down in a cake.

The reason for the awkwardness is plain division. Sixteen tablespoons won't split by 3, so a third of a cup leaves a remainder. Forty-eight teaspoons will, and a third of a cup is a clean 16 teaspoons. Thirds fall apart in tablespoons and come back together in teaspoons, which is why the exact answer has to borrow one.

How do you measure ⅓ cup without a ⅓ measure?

A ¼ cup measure plus 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon lands exactly on ⅓ cup in three scoops instead of six. That's the route I'd take for anything that has to be leveled. Tell the conversion tool you don't have a ⅓ cup and the plan switches to it; leave the box alone and it keeps the answer as a single ⅓ cup scoop, the sensible default if the measure is in the drawer. It also takes 1/3, 2/3 or 1 1/3 as typed and answers with the fraction rather than a rounded decimal, so 5⅓ means what it says.

Grams are tidier than tablespoons here. A third of a cup of all-purpose flour is 40 grams on the King Arthur chart, and granulated sugar is 66 grams: round numbers from an unround fraction, and no leftover teaspoon to remember. Butter is the in-between case, since ⅓ cup is ⅔ of a stick, about 76 grams, and the wrapper's fifth mark needs a sliver added to get there.

What is half of ⅓ cup?

A sixth of a cup, or 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons, or 8 teaspoons if you prefer one number. You won't find a ⅙ cup in a standard set, so this is a spoon job no matter what you own. I'd scoop it rather than trying to fill the ⅓ cup measure halfway, because "halfway" in a cup is a judgment call and two tablespoons and two teaspoons is not.

Weights halve more gracefully, of course: 20 grams of flour, 33 grams of sugar.

What is ⅓ cup doubled?

⅔ cup, which is 10⅔ tablespoons, or 10 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons. If your set has a ⅔ cup, one scoop finishes it. If it doesn't, two ⅓ cup scoops are the obvious move. And if the ⅓ cup is the piece that's missing, ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons is exact.

Tripling is the satisfying one: three thirds make 1 cup, 16 tablespoons, and the fractions disappear. A batch and a half is nearly as kind, since 1½ times ⅓ cup is exactly ½ cup. So a recipe full of ⅓ cup lines scales best by 1½ or 3 and worst by ½. If you get to choose your batch size, that's worth a thought before you start, and the recipe scaler will show you what each line turns into. A quarter cup by comparison stays tidy in every direction.