Cups vs grams: why bakers weigh their ingredients

If you have ever followed a recipe exactly and still ended up with a dense cake or flat cookies, measuring by cups may be the reason. Here is why grams are more reliable.

Cups measure space, grams measure stuff

A cup is a volume: it tells you how much space something takes up. A gram is a weight: it tells you how much of the ingredient there actually is. Light, fluffy ingredients fill a cup with less weight than dense ones. That is why 1 cup of flour is about 120 g but 1 cup of sugar is 198 g.

Three reasons to weigh

1. Consistency. 120 g of flour is always 120 g, however it was scooped, sifted or settled.
2. Fewer dishes. Put one bowl on the scale and add each ingredient in turn, pressing “tare” between them. No measuring cups to wash.
3. Easy scaling. Doubling or halving a recipe in grams is simple arithmetic. With cups you end up with amounts like “2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons”.

When cups are fine

For liquids like water and milk, a cup is accurate enough because liquids don’t compress. For savory cooking, small differences rarely matter. It is in baking, with flour, sugar and cocoa, that weighing makes the biggest difference.

Recipe only gives cups? Paste it into our recipe converter to get every ingredient in grams.