How to use this card
Most recipe failures are weight failures in disguise. A muffin that comes out squat and dense, a cake that pulls away from the pan too early, a sauce that breaks when it shouldn't — the ingredient ratios were off, and the ratios were off because the measuring was off. A kitchen scale and a reference card eliminate most of that in one move.
This card lists the weight of common measures for 120+ ingredients. The category filter narrows by baking, dairy, meat, produce, pantry, or liquids. The scale multiplier rewrites every weight for the recipe size you actually need — set it to 0.5 to halve a recipe, 1.5 to make one and a half batches, 2 to double. The Export PDF button produces a printable one-page version you can tape inside a cabinet.
Why weighing beats measuring (for baking, at least)
Volume measurements work fine for stew — a tablespoon more or less of onion doesn't wreck dinner. Baking is different. The chemistry of leavening, gluten, and sugar is ratio-sensitive. A 10% error in flour from a heavy-packed cup changes the hydration of a bread dough enough to notice. That is why professional kitchens work in grams: the same recipe produces the same result whoever is on the line.
For everyday cooking, memorize five weights and you're 80% of the way there: 1 cup flour ≈ 120 g, 1 cup sugar ≈ 200 g, 1 cup water ≈ 240 g, 1 stick butter = 113 g, 1 large egg = 50 g. With those five, you can reconstruct most recipes from scratch.
Ingredients that hide the most error
The worst offenders — where volume and weight disagree by enough to matter:
- Flour — packs vary 20% (scooped ~150 g/cup vs spooned ~120 g/cup). A cake recipe written for 120 g flour baked with a scooped 150 g comes out dry. Spoon-and-level or weigh.
- Brown sugar — "packed" vs "loose" is also a 20%+ range. Recipes almost always mean packed; the card lists the packed weight (213 g/cup).
- Kosher salt — Diamond Crystal is half the weight per teaspoon of table salt. A stew seasoned with 1 tsp Diamond is dramatically less salty than the same recipe with 1 tsp Morton table salt. See the two entries side by side.
- Butter — US sticks are 113 g (4 oz). European butter bars are 250 g. "1 stick" means nothing in a European recipe.
- Yeast — 1 packet of active dry yeast is 7 g, or about 2¼ tsp. Instant yeast is denser per teaspoon. If the recipe says grams, use grams.
- Chicken breasts — modern supermarket breasts are 200–300 g each; legacy recipes often assume 150 g. If your stir-fry is dry, it's not the heat, it's the portion size.
Halving and doubling — the safe way
Scaling a recipe by weight is clean: multiply every ingredient by the same factor. Scaling by volume introduces rounding errors that compound. Halving 1¾ cups of flour by volume is awkward; halving 210 g by weight is 105 g. Done.
A few ingredients don't scale linearly. Leavening scales sub-linearly above 1.5×: a 2× recipe often needs only 1.7–1.8× the baking powder. Spices and salt scale sub-linearly above 2×: double a chili and the heat feels more than doubled, because the surface area of contact on your tongue doesn't double. Seared meat scales sub-linearly with pan size: twice as much chicken in the same pan steams instead of browning. When in doubt, cook in two batches.
Cup sizes around the world (yes, this really varies)
- US legal cup (nutrition labels) — 240 ml.
- US customary cup (most recipes) — 236.6 ml.
- Metric cup (Australia, NZ, Canada) — 250 ml.
- Japanese cup — 200 ml.
- UK legal cup — 284 ml, though modern UK recipes usually use grams.
The spread between the smallest (Japanese, 200 ml) and the largest (UK, 284 ml) is 42%. For a cookie, it's the difference between crisp and cakey. For a stew, you'd never notice. The card uses US customary (236.6 ml) for all "1 cup" entries because that's what most English-language recipes assume.
Weights that depend on the season, brand, or cut
"A medium onion" is a range, not a weight — farmers' market onions in fall can be twice the size of the pre-bagged supermarket ones in January. The card gives the average (150 g), but a recipe that asks for 2 medium onions has a built-in ±30% tolerance, which most savory recipes can absorb without complaint. Baking recipes that call for "2 medium eggs" are the exception — eggs are graded for a reason, and substituting extra-large for large shifts a batter's hydration.
What to do when a recipe and a package disagree
Butter packaging says "1 stick = ½ cup"; the recipe says "1 cup butter, softened". Which stick? US sticks (113 g) are the common case in North America; European pound bars are 250 g; Irish butter sometimes comes in 227 g blocks. When a recipe uses sticks instead of weight, it's almost certainly a North American recipe — read US stick and weigh if you want to be sure. Weight is the universal translator.
Useful related tools
- Cooking volume converter — cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, ml.
- Cooking weight converter — grams, ounces, pounds.
- Oven temperature chart — gas mark, °C, °F with doneness context.
- Temperature by feel — quick read on what 40 °C, 180 °C, 400 °F mean.
A note on precision
Every weight on this card is rounded to the nearest whole gram or nearest 0.05 oz. That precision is well within real-world measurement error — a typical household scale drifts ±1 g below 100 g and ±3 g above, and an ingredient's natural variability often exceeds that. The practical takeaway: don't chase decimal places. Get the order of magnitude right, be consistent between runs, and the recipe will be consistent too.