Cup Conversion

Convert US Cups of ingredients to Grams

Cup Conversion Formula

In this calculation we are converting an amount of volume to an amount of mass and so a density value is needed to convert these two.

The amount in grams is determined by multiplying the number of cups by the volume of a cup (236 cm^3) and the density of the ingredient.

$Weight g = # Cups \times {Volume of 1 Cup cm}^{3} \times Density of Ingredient \frac{g}{{cm}^{3}}$

Example

For 2 cups of rice which has a density of 0.8 the mass is 378g.

$378 g = 2 \times {236 cm}^{3} \times 0.8 \frac{g}{{cm}^{3}}$

Background

The internet has opened up world of new recipes which is excellent. However sometimes, particularly for recipes in the US, the author has used a cup as a unit of measurement which can be tricky to convert. Especially as the weight of that volume of ingredient will differ based on the ingredient. I.e. a cup of sugar will weigh significantly different to a cup of marshmallows whilst being the same volume.

Finding densities to use for this calculator for the pre-sets or for the manual calculation hasn't proved straightforward either. The web in it's diversity tends to have a lot of opinions on this! I have tried to steer towards authorative sources and found this source particularly useful as through shipping materials they probably pay close attention to the weight of it.