Cups, millilitres, and everything between.

Volume is the most common way home cooks measure. It's convenient, it's tactile, and the tools — measuring cups, measuring spoons — are inexpensive enough to live in every kitchen drawer. But volume measurements are also where most cross-recipe confusion starts: a US cup is not a metric cup, a US tablespoon is not an Australian tablespoon, and a fluid ounce isn't the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

The numbers behind the converter

ScaleRecipe uses the United States customary system as the reference. The conversions this tool applies are exact:

• 1 US teaspoon = 4.92892 ml
• 1 US tablespoon = 14.7868 ml = 3 teaspoons
• 1 US fluid ounce = 29.5735 ml = 2 tablespoons
• 1 US cup = 236.588 ml = 8 fluid ounces = 16 tablespoons = 48 teaspoons
• 1 US pint = 473.176 ml = 2 cups
• 1 US quart = 946.353 ml = 2 pints = 4 cups
• 1 US gallon = 3785.41 ml = 4 quarts = 16 cups

What about metric cups?

A metric cup, used in many recipe books published in continental Europe and Australia, is 250 ml— about 6% larger than the US cup. If you're cooking from an Australian or European cookbook with a US measuring cup, you can ignore the difference for everyday savoury cooking. For baking, multiply the metric quantity by roughly 1.057 to get the equivalent in US cups, or simply use the volume converter above.

What about UK / imperial volumes?

The UK uses a slightly different fluid ounce (28.413 ml versus 29.574 ml) and a much larger pint (568 ml versus 473 ml). UK recipes that pre-date metric adoption may use imperial pints, and the difference is large enough to matter. When in doubt, weigh.

When to use volume vs. weight

For everything that gets cooked down or tasted as you go — soups, sauces, stews, sautés — measuring by volume is fine. The recipe has plenty of room for the small inaccuracies volume measurement introduces, and a measuring cup is simply faster than a scale.

For baking, pastry, and bread, switch to weight or use the ingredient converter to translate volumes into grams. A cup of all-purpose flour can weigh anywhere from 113 g (sifted) to 150 g (packed) depending on how it was measured — a 30% difference that ruins cookie texture and cake structure.

Common cooking volumes you'll need

• 1 stick of butter = 8 tbsp = ½ cup = 113 g
• 1 large egg ≈ 3 tbsp ≈ 50 g (in volume terms)
• 1 cup of liquid = 8 fl oz = 240 ml (rounded)
• A pinch ≈ ⅛ teaspoon
• A dash ≈ ⅛ to ¼ teaspoon

Working with the scaler

The recipe scaler uses these same volume relationships to do smart unit promotion automatically: when scaling, 3 tsp becomes 1 tbsp, 16 tbsp becomes 1 cup, and 4 cups becomes 1 quart. Promotions only fire when the result is at least one unit of the larger size, so a recipe scaled by 1.25× still reads naturally.