How Many Grams in a Cup?

Decide what is in the cup before you do any math. The formula above is for water and drinks that are mostly water. For anything else, multiply the number of cups by the weight of one cup of that ingredient.

Take flour. USDA lists a cup of all-purpose flour (plain flour) at 125 grams, so 2 1/4 cups of it weighs 2 1/4 × 125 = 281 grams. For 3/4 cup of granulated sugar, the sum is 3/4 × 200 = 150 grams.

Pencil the gram figure next to the cup amount on your recipe card. The next time you bake, you can skip the measuring cups and pour straight into a bowl on the scale. For recipes that already give grams, the grams to cups page runs the math in reverse.

A British, Australian or Canadian recipe that says "1 cup" usually means the metric cup in the table below. It holds a little more than a US cup, so the grams go up with it. A metric cup of water weighs 250 grams, and a metric cup of flour about 132 grams.

For a single cup the gap hardly matters. In a big bake it adds up: 5 cups of flour weigh about 625 grams in US cups and 660 grams in metric cups.

A cup is a measure of space, and a gram is a measure of weight. Two cups filled with different foods take up the same room but hold different amounts of food. Flour is light and airy, so a cup of it weighs roughly half as much as a cup of water.

Chunky foods leave gaps between the pieces. A cup of blueberries weighs about 148 grams, and a cup of diced raw potato about 150 grams. How you fill the cup changes things too, since flour pressed down into a cup weighs more than flour spooned in loosely.

No. A dry measuring cup and a glass liquid measure marked "1 cup" hold the same volume, 236.6 ml. Only the food inside changes the weight.

The two cups are shaped for different jobs. You fill a dry cup to the brim and level it with a knife, which suits flour and sugar. A liquid measure has a spout and a line below the rim, so milk or water can reach the mark without spilling.