How to convert American cups to pounds and ounces, or metric please?

with water, anyway. But flour's weight is variable as to volume vs. weight. 

Go to onlineconversions.com.  This should help you.

 

Regards,

Patricia

....your best bet is to go with a kitchen scale, not volume.

The American system of using "cups" and "ounces"(which is usually FLUID ounces) are volume measures and don't always convert to grams and kilograms on the first try.You may have some trial and error using recipes with the volumetric ingredients. Even if you measure a "cup" of flour and weigh it in g/kg by , there is a question if it is the correct amount.I might sift and fluff my flour when I dole out the "cup" and you may scoop and scrape.My cup may have less flour in it by weight than yours. So if you determine 1 cup of flour weighs 140g, my cup may weigh 120. You will still have to do a trial and error to make sure the recipe turns out as you want. There is just no way to guarantee a recipe "converted" will turn out the first time around. And it may take several attempts.

If you think you will be doing this often, order a set of American measuring cups and spoons online and make the recipe by weighing out the cups and tablespoons and tweaking the recipe to get it where you want.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/index.html

When you find the product you are looking for click on the circle next to it, up comes volume and the equivalent gram counterparts.  Thus you should be able to convert any recipe with a few minutes of work.   Good Luck!!

I think King Arthur recommends 4 ounce cups, but that never worked for me even using their recipes.  In Salt Lake City, which is a very arid environment, I used to use 4.25 ounce cups for unbleached AP and whole wheat, but now that I'm in Minnesota where it's humid I use 4.5 ounce cups to get a good result (flour takes up moisture).  I always weigh flours unless the recipe explicitly calls for scoop and sweep -- I think it's much more consistent.

As stated above, conversion from "volume" measures (especially American 'cups') is problematic no matter what you do. That's why recipes that give "weight" measures (grams or even ounces) are much preferred  ...but recipes don't always give "weight" measures, so how do I cope?

If one particular recipe really interests me, I use one of those mathematical conversion tools to get "approximate" weights, then trial bake it. If I have to adjust immediately to make the dough "feel right", I weigh all my adjustments and write them down. Evsn so, it never seems to comes out right the first time, so I "adjust" the weights and trial bake a second batch. A third round of adjust and try is almost always necessary too. Once I finally get it right, I pencil in the weight amounts right on the recipe so they'll always be there in the future (that recipe is finally now "converted" and I don't want to do it all over again:-).

If I have a whole cookbook full of recipes that don't give weight measures, I just put it on the back shelf and get a different cookbook. For me it's just plain not worth the hassle. Besides, breadbaking techniques have improved and changed so much in the past few years that using a "new" cookbook can make a big difference anyway. (There are quite a few individual recipes right here on TFL. And Floyd lists some great current bread books right in the darker brown sidebar to the left.)

(One advantage of using recipes you find right here on TFL is if something goes wrong you can take pictures and post them and ask and get a whole lot of well-informed opinions on exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.)

 

 I'm not sure where I got this list but I've had it a while and it's been handy for me. Good luck! Mary

 

Dry Goods Conversions

 

All-Purpose Flour and Confectioners' Sugar

Cups      Grams  Ounces

 1/8 cup(2 T)       16 g       .563 oz

 1/4 cup                32 g       1.13 oz

 1/3 cup                43 g       1.5 oz

 1/2 cup                64 g       2.25 oz

 2/3 cup                85 g       3 oz

 3/4 cup                96 g       3.38 oz

 1 cup                 128 g       4.5 oz

 

Bread Flour

 Cups     Grams  Ounces

1/4 cup 34 g       1.2 oz

1/3 cup 45 g       1.6 oz

1/2 cup 68 g       2.4 oz

1 cup     136 g     4.8 oz

 

Rolled Oats

 Cups     Grams  Ounces

 1/4 c     21 g       .75 oz

 1/3 c     28 g       1 oz

 1/2 c     43 g       1.5 oz

 1 c          85 g       3 oz

 

White Sugar (Granulated)

 Cups     Grams  Ounces

 2 Tbsp                  25 g       .89 oz

 1/4 cup                50 g       1.78 oz

 1/3 cup                67 g       2.37 oz

 1/2 cup                100 g     3.55 oz

 2/3 cup                134 g     4.73 oz

 3/4 cup                150 g     5.3 oz

 1 cup                    201 g     7.1 oz

 

Packed Brown Sugar

 Cups     Grams  Ounces

 1/4 c     55 g       1.9 oz

 1/3 c     73 g       2.58 oz

 1/2 c     110 g     3.88 oz

 1 c          220 g     7.75 oz

 

Honey, Molasses & Syrup

 Cups     Grams  Ounces

 2 Tbsp  43 g       1.5 oz

 1/4 c     85 g       3 oz

 1/3 c     113 g     4 oz

 1/2 c     170 g     6 oz

 2/3 c     227 g     8 oz

 3/4 c     255 g     9 oz

 1 c          340 g     12 oz

 

More Quick Conversions

1 c chocolate chips = 152 g

1 c cocoa powder = 128 g

1 c walnuts, chopped = 122 g

1 c walnut/pecan halves = 99 g

1 c shredded coconut = 71 g

1 c solid shortening, e.g. Crisco® = 205 g

1Tbsp baking powder = 12 g

1 Tbsp salt = 18 g

 

I just finished posting a "how-to" for this type of conversion self-help.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/19720/conversion-calculator-example

Perhaps, it may help some of you.

 

Ron

Measuring by American cups is tricky. Why? Because sometimes you don't know whether the author of the recipe uses the "dip measuring cup into flour" method or the "spoon flour into measuring cup" method.

I've ruined recipes before where I dip the measuring cup into the flour and then level off. I finally learned that you're not supposed to do that because it takes in more flour. You have to take a spoon and fill the measuring cup and then level off the excess. 

However, for some recipes, people do dip the measuring cup into the flour and level off the excess.

For cakes, I think it's sifting the flour into the measuring cup. 

It's confusing at times using the measuring cup.

Just found this conversion. Have also spent time writing in the 'sidelines'. Living in Ireland, just joined site. Have made 

Challahs and am looking for a wonderful doughnut recipe to try out. Thanks. 

It is worse in Canada, we are officially metric but there are a lot of legacy recipes that are in cups (imperial cups a little larger than an American cup), then there are all these recipes out of American publications, cook books, websites etc that use American cups, the more progessive publications may give a lb and oz measurement and then of course there are some cookbooks that at least give the metric equivalent to the volume measurements.  It would be nice if the whole cooking publication industry switched to measuring by weight (not really concerned if it is metric or not as I work with both) but I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.  

Gerhard

I recently worked with my daughter at her house to devlop a legacy recipe for a family bread. It was from a grandmother and was written in "about so many cups" kind of state.Someone probably watched grandma make the bread and wrote down approximately what she did. 

I first had my daughter practice weighing out her flour using her measuring cups and tablespoons to develop a consistent technique. An interesting phenomena was she had 2 sets of measuring cups and 2 sets of measuring spoons and even though she consistently measured the flour out the same way with both sets, the weights were different.In other words, 1 cup of AP flour using the blue cup set was consistently 130g on several measurings and the 1 cup measure from the red cup set was consistently 150 g! Same phenomenon when I did it! So measuring cups and spoons themselves are not always standard. I suspect that is often the reason why "recipes" are not to be regarded as "formulas" and what works for me may not work for you when I share my recipe. Since the sets were so different, we discarded 1 set. Now she has a recipe adapted to her tools.

So be aware-cups don't always equal cups!

I have another thread on here about this conversion thing. I use ABin5 method and they use scoop and level which is not a correct way. Also, ABin5 does not give flour in weight but cups.

 You pull a piece of dough off for the size you need, cantelope, grapefruit etc....LOL. Now I 'm trying to convert the cups to grams so I want to start weighing my flour to be more consistent.