You have found a recipe written in grams, you do not own a scale, and buying one tonight is not an option. This is workable. It requires a bit of care and some honesty about the limits.
Rule one: never use a generic conversion
The single biggest error is applying one gram-to-cup factor across a whole ingredient list. 200 grams of sugar is one cup. 200 grams of rolled oats is two and a half cups. Using sugar's factor for oats gives you 40% of the oats the recipe wanted.
Look up each ingredient separately, or use a tool that asks which ingredient you mean.
The figures worth memorising
These cover the overwhelming majority of baking:
| Ingredient | 1 cup weighs |
|---|---|
| All-purpose flour | 120 g |
| Granulated sugar | 200 g |
| Brown sugar, packed | 213 g |
| Powdered sugar | 120 g |
| Butter | 227 g |
| Water or milk | 237–244 g |
| Vegetable oil | 218 g |
| Rolled oats | 80 g |
| Cocoa powder | 85 g |
| Honey | 340 g |
Two structural facts are worth committing alongside them: 1 cup = 16 tablespoons = 48 teaspoons, and 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. Between them you can measure almost any awkward fraction.
Butter is the easy one
US butter is sold in sticks with tablespoon markings printed on the wrapper. One stick is 113 grams, which is half a cup or 8 tablespoons. You can cut what you need with a knife and no measuring at all:
- 1 stick = 113 g = 1/2 cup = 8 tbsp
- 1/2 stick = 57 g = 1/4 cup = 4 tbsp
- 2 sticks = 227 g = 1 cup
European butter usually comes in 250 gram blocks, often with markings too. Either way, cutting a block is more accurate than packing softened butter into a cup.
Use the packaging as a scale
This feels crude and is often more accurate than measuring by volume. If a bag of sugar is 1 kilogram and you need 200 grams, you need a fifth of it. If a bag of flour is 1.5 kg and you need 300 grams, that is a fifth as well. Judging a fifth of a bag by eye beats trying to spoon-and-level three cups of flour without practice.
It works particularly well for compressible ingredients, which are exactly the ones volume measuring handles worst.
The water shortcut
For water and thin water-based liquids, 1 millilitre weighs about 1 gram. So 250 grams of water is 250 ml, which is a little over one US cup. Any liquid measuring jug with millilitre markings becomes a scale for water, stock and most juices.
This does not extend to oil (lighter), honey or syrup (much heavier), or milk (very slightly heavier).
Displacement, for solid fats
An old trick that still works. To measure 113 grams of butter — half a cup — fill a liquid measuring jug to 1 cup with cold water, then add butter until the water reaches 1.5 cups. Pour off the water and you have exactly half a cup of butter. It is fiddly, but it is accurate and it beats trying to pack a soft fat into a dry cup without air pockets.
Measuring awkward amounts with spoons
When a conversion lands between cup markings, spoons close the gap. A cup is 16 tablespoons, so:
| Fraction of a cup | In tablespoons |
|---|---|
| 1/16 | 1 tbsp |
| 1/8 | 2 tbsp |
| 1/4 | 4 tbsp |
| 1/3 | 5 tbsp + 1 tsp |
| 1/2 | 8 tbsp |
| 2/3 | 10 tbsp + 2 tsp |
| 3/4 | 12 tbsp |
So 2.08 cups of flour is 2 cups plus a tablespoon and a teaspoon — near enough that the remaining error is smaller than the technique variation you were already living with.
Where this approach genuinely fails
Be realistic about the boundaries:
- Bread. Hydration is a weight ratio. Getting flour wrong by 10% changes the dough's behaviour completely, and consistent bread by volume is very difficult.
- Laminated pastry. Croissants and puff pastry depend on precise fat-to-flour proportions.
- Yeast, salt and leavening. Small quantities where a small absolute error is a large proportional one. Use proper measuring spoons — most domestic scales cannot resolve 2 grams anyway, so a scale would not help much here either.
- Anything you want to repeat. If you cannot measure consistently, you cannot tell whether a change you made improved the recipe.
Everyday objects as rough references
Not precise, but useful for a sanity check when a number feels wrong:
- A standard US stick of butter is 113 g. If your 100 g of butter looks much bigger than a stick, something is off.
- A large egg out of the shell is about 50 g.
- A level tablespoon of flour is about 7.5 g; of sugar, about 12.5 g.
- A level teaspoon of salt is about 6 g.
- A 250 ml liquid jug filled to the top holds about 250 g of water.
These are worth knowing mainly as error detectors. If a conversion tells you to use 400 g of butter and that would be nearly four sticks for a single tray of brownies, check the arithmetic before you commit the butter.
In the meantime
Measure carefully, use ingredient-specific figures, and accept some variance. Our printable conversion chart covers the common amounts on one page you can keep in a drawer, and the converter handles anything not on it.
Then buy a scale. They cost less than a couple of bags of good flour and they end this problem permanently.