Cooking Measurements

A recipe is really a math document: 2 cups of flour, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, bake at 180°C for 40 minutes. When the guest count jumps from 4 to 8, every number has to follow. Kitchen math is a small body of knowledge, every piece of it useful and mostly unchanging — worth learning once, properly.

The units you actually use

Milliliters and liters (mL, L): for liquids, 1 L = 1000 mL;
Grams and kilograms (g, kg): for weights, 1 kg = 1000 g;
Teaspoons and tablespoons (tsp, tbsp): 1 tsp = 5 mL; 1 tbsp = 15 mL — exactly 3 teaspoons;
Cups: 1 cup ≈ 240 mL, handy for water or milk.

Memorize 5, 15 and 240 and you have settled most of the measuring questions a Western recipe can ask. For where these units come from, see Metric Units & Conversion.

More guests? Scale the recipe

Double batch: multiply everything by 2. Half batch: divide by 2. The only friction is fractions — and that is home turf for Fraction Arithmetic:

Recipe calls for 3/4 cup of sugar, doubled: $\frac{3}{4} \times 2 = \frac{3}{2} = 1\tfrac{1}{2}$ cups;
1/2 tsp of salt, halved: $\frac{1}{2} \div 2 = \frac{1}{4}$ tsp;
1 1/3 cups of milk, doubled: $\frac{4}{3} \times 2 = \frac{8}{3} = 2\tfrac{2}{3}$ cups.

If fractions feel fussy, fall back to mL: 1/3 cup ≈ 80 mL, so doubled that is 160 mL — straight onto the measuring cup.

Weight is not volume

A measuring cup measures volume (how much space), a scale measures weight (how heavy). The two are not freely interchangeable:

100 mL of honey is not 100 g

Honey is dense — about 1.4 g per mL — so 100 mL of honey actually weighs around 140 g. Water is the friendly exception: 1 mL of water is exactly 1 g. Flour, sugar and oil each have their own density. If the recipe says grams, use the scale; if it says mL or cups, use the cup. Do not cross the lines.

Oven temperatures: two scales

Recipes from Fahrenheit countries often list °F directly. This cheat sheet is worth memorizing:

150°C ≈ 300°F (slow, low baking)
180°C ≈ 350°F (the workhorse baking temperature)
200°C ≈ 400°F (high heat, browning)
220°C ≈ 425°F (pizza and bread)

For the exact conversion use $°F = °C \times \frac{9}{5} + 32$ : plugging in 180°C gives 356, which recipes round to 350. To check any other temperature on the spot, use this converter:

InteractiveKitchen Converter

→≈ 100 cm

Start with 180 ↔ 350

180°C ≈ 350°F is the single most common setting in all of baking. Memorize that pair and you can interpolate the rest with ease.

Check yourself

Quick quiz

1. How many milliliters is 1 tablespoon?
2. A recipe needs 3/4 cup. How much for a double batch?
3. An oven at 180°C is roughly how hot in Fahrenheit?