Butter converter
Sticks, cups, tablespoons, grams and the British 250 g block. A stick is a defined quarter-pound and a cup is a measurement, so one cup is 2.0018 sticks and this page says so. Nothing you type here leaves your browser — it is worked out on your own device, so there is nothing to send and nothing to log.
A stick is a weight, not a volume
American butter is sold in sticks, and a stick is defined by weight: a quarter of a pound, which is 113.398 g. Everything else on the wrapper — the cup marks, the tablespoon marks — follows from that and from butter's density.
British and Irish butter is sold in 250 g blocks, which is not a whole number of sticks. 250 g is 2.205 sticks, so a recipe calling for two sticks wants 227 g and leaves 23 g of the block behind.
One cup is not quite two sticks
Every chart says one cup of butter is two sticks. Two sticks is 226.796 g, and USDA measured a cup of butter at 227 g. So a cup is 2.0018 sticks — a gap of 0.2 g, or 0.09%.
| Two sticks, by definition | 226.796 g |
|---|---|
| One cup, as USDA measured it | 227 g |
| The difference | 0.204 g, 0.09% |
It does not matter in a kitchen. It is here because the two numbers come from different places — one is a definition and one is a measurement — and a page that rounded them together would be hiding that. Nothing else on this page depends on the conversion being exactly two.
Where the cup weight comes from
The 227 g is from USDA FoodData Central,
SR Legacy — a work of the United States government, public
domain, with an fdcId naming the exact food. The stick
is not from there: a stick is a quarter of a pound by definition,
and definitions do not need measuring.
Measuring butter by volume is the part to avoid. Scooping soft butter into a cup packs it; pressing cold butter in leaves air; and neither is quite the cup USDA measured. It is the same problem as scooping versus sifting flour, and worse, because butter's firmness changes with the room. Sticks and grams are both weights and neither has this problem, which is why this page answers in both and treats cups as the awkward unit they are.
Salted and unsalted weigh the same
USDA measures both at 227 g per cup. The selector
is there because the two are different foods with different
fdcIds, and the page names the one it used — not
because the answer changes. If a future measurement separates them,
this page will show it rather than having averaged them away.