Grams to cups

Weight back into cups, for the ingredients USDA has actually measured. Fourteen of the thirty-six asked for are missing, and the page says which and why rather than estimating them. 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.

The same arithmetic, and the same caveat

Going from weight to volume divides where the other direction multiplies, and inherits exactly the same uncertainty: the answer is only as good as the density, and the density depends on how the cup is filled. Scooped flour packs; spooned flour does not. A scale does not care, which is the whole argument for using one.

This page answers in US cups, because that is the cup USDA measured. It also gives tablespoons and millilitres, because a third of a cup is a more useful answer expressed as five tablespoons.

What is not here, and why

Thirty-six ingredients were asked for and fourteen are missing. Not because they are unusual — brown sugar, icing sugar, bread flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, dried yeast, almonds, walnuts, desiccated coconut and raisins are all ordinary — but because USDA records no plain cup portion for them. Some are recorded only by the packet, some only by weight, some by a qualified cup (“1 cup, packed”) that is a different measurement.

Every other converter on the internet has all of them, because every other converter has a density table with no source on it. Those numbers are not derivable from anything: a cup of brown sugar weighing 220 g is something somebody measured, or something somebody made up, and from the outside the two look identical.

Water is missing too, which surprises people. USDA has no cup portion for tap water, and it cannot honestly be derived either: the US customary cup is 236.588 ml, the legal cup is 240, and water's density is itself a measurement that changes with temperature. Working it out would produce a number with a plausible provenance and no source, which is the one thing this page is for avoiding.

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