Cooking Volume converter

This converter's reference unit is the milliliter, and every other kitchen measure is expressed as a multiple of it. A US teaspoon equals 4.928921594 mL, a US tablespoon (exactly three teaspoons) equals 14.78676478 mL, and a US cup equals 236.5882365 mL. The metric kitchen uses rounder numbers by design: a metric teaspoon is exactly 5 mL, a metric tablespoon exactly 15 mL and a metric cup exactly 250 mL.

The pair cooks look up most is cup (US) to milliliter. The conversion is a direct multiply: mL = cup × 236.5882365. Reversing it means multiplying by 0.004226752838, or simply dividing by 236.5882365.

Two US cups convert to 2 × 236.5882365 = 473.176473 mL, which is exactly one US pint, since a pint is defined as two cups. A recipe calling for 3/4 cup converts to 0.75 × 236.5882365 ≈ 177.44 mL, a number worth rounding to 177 or 180 mL for a kitchen scale rather than chasing extra decimal places.

Americans measure by cups, tablespoons and teaspoons because US recipes are traditionally written by volume, and the measuring cups and spoons sold for that purpose are calibrated to the US values above. Much of the rest of the world bakes and cooks by weight in grams, but when a recipe does call for volume, it almost always means the rounder metric teaspoon, tablespoon and cup values. British and Commonwealth cookbooks add a third system — the Imperial cup, tablespoon and fluid ounce — which are all slightly different sizes again, a leftover from pre-metric UK kitchen measures.

The single biggest baking mistake this converter exists to prevent is treating a "cup" as one universal size. A US cup (236.59 mL), a metric cup (250 mL) and a UK cup (284.13 mL) differ by as much as 20%, and using the wrong one in a recipe that depends on precise ratios — bread dough, custard, a cake batter — can visibly change the texture or rise. Tablespoons and teaspoons carry the same trap: the UK tablespoon (17.76 mL) is noticeably bigger than the US tablespoon (14.79 mL).

Pinch and dash are the two genuinely informal units on this list. By long kitchen convention, a pinch is about 1/16 of a teaspoon and a dash about 1/8 of a teaspoon, small enough that no one measures them with an actual spoon, but useful here for converting an old handwritten recipe that calls for "a dash of this, a pinch of that" into something a measuring spoon can approximate.