How much does a cup of flour weigh?
Here’s a question that seems to pop up on a fairly regular basis in the bread forums. Someone sees a recipe that requires 3.5 cups of flour, or one that looks for 368g of flour. Either way, they’re used to the other method of measuring and they run into problems making the conversion from one to the other.
Why is it confusing? Because one is a volume measure and the other is a weight measure. As we all know that a cup of rocks and a cup of feathers will not weigh the same. Simply stated, volume and weight are not a consistent and easily interchangeable form of measure. Add in the confusion of liquid vs dry ounces and cups and you have a mess.
But there’s probably a set “standard” weight for flour, right? I mean, measuring flour is something people do ALL the time so someone somewhere probably has The Definitive Weight for a “cup of flour”.
Well, the short answer is: no.
One reason for that is there are several different versions of “cups”. Not only do you have a liquid and dry cup – your glass Pyrex cup is for liquids, your plastic scoop set is for dry ingredients – but there’s also regional differences between cups. A cup in the US is 8 fluid oz US but 8.32 fluid oz UK. 1 oz UK is .96 oz US. If we look at smaller measures, 1 tablespoon US is .5 oz but .52 oz UK. If you go with Australian measures a Tablespoon is different from either UK or US amounts.
Confused yet?
Even within the US, a cup (liquid) and a cup (dry) are different amounts; if we look at the volume measure of a dry cup it is 225 ml while a liquid cup is 237 ml. So the measure switches and can be confusing if the type of measure isn’t clear. Obviously, one may “assume” that if you’re measuring flour, you’d use dry volume and not liquid. But are you sure the recipe’s author didn’t just grab their glass Pirex cup to measure the flour? If it doesn’t specify, you might assume wrong. Now if you’re adding one cup of water and one cup of flour, the difference may be minor but when you get into several cups it may start seriously affecting your finished bread.
But let’s keep the discussion at converting flour from volume to weight (or weight to volume) and see how that works.
There are many sources for what one might hope is a “standard” for this conversion. I mean, with all the bread baking books out there, surely there’s a consensus within the professional baking stratosphere. You’d think anyway, right?
Again: Nope.
Here’s a brief rundown of what professional bakers use in their books, based only on the books I have in my personal collection. I’ve taken each author’s equivalence and, where they give (dry) oz but not grams, I’ve used a converter to get the missing info. It is internationally accepted that a US dry ounce (oz) is 28.349 grams.
Going from smallest to largest:
- Toba Garrett says 3.8 oz (107g)
- King Arthur Flour says 4.25 oz (120g)
- Peter Reinhart says 4.5 oz (127g)
- Jeffrey Hamelman says 4.8 oz (136g)
- Maggie Glazer says 4.8 oz (136g) – though to her credit she ALWAYS qualifies it as “About X cups…”
- Rose Levy Beranbaum says 5.5 oz (157g)
And that’s just based on the books I happen to have. If your library is different or you hunt up a conversion table online, you’ll likely have various other amounts. According to one online converter I checked while writing this, 1 US cup of all purpose flour was 99g, even less than the above list.
So as you can see, there’s some wiggle room and certainly no “definitive” weight for a cup of flour. Even between the different flour manufacturers, their expected amounts vary. If you look at their nutrition labels, they’ll usually list their values per ”1/4 cup (30 grams)” or 33g or 28g or…
And after you’ve put in “exactly” that much flour, you may still need to “adjust as necessary” anyway to compensate for your particular flour’s humidity and water absorption and to get the consistency the recipe wants (tacky, sticky, etc.). Different brands of “bread flour” are not all created equal.
So what’s a baker to do? Use digital scales and use recipes that specify weights, whether by dry ounces or grams. American cookbooks are notoriously reluctant to give up the volume measure for dry ingredients although many recent books are at least giving various measures, so if the author says “4 1/2 cups of flour” there will hopefully at least be an equivalent weight included in dry ounces and, with luck, grams as well.
For example, I have Jeffrey Hamelman’s book Bread open here (I just made some Vermont Sourdough) and his formula for this bread specifies, for the home size batch, “4.8 oz (1 cup)” of bread flour. So he’s giving us both the weight and volume. Since I go by grams, I calculate that (oz X 28.3 = grams) and get 136 grams and I pencil that into the book. (Yes, I do write in my cookbooks but in pencil so I can change it in case I need to make adjustments later.)
So according to the Yumarama Bread Blog, how big is a cup of flour? I presume 4.5 oz or 127g unless a specific weight is given in the recipe or elsewhere in the book. If I can, I’ll always try to go for a recipe that includes weights over one that uses only cups. And better still if it includes grams as they’re much easier to increase/decrease and, being smaller, are more accurate.
So if you don’t already, go out and get yourself a good digital scale. It won’t cost a huge amount, probably in the $20 to $30 range for one with both ounces and grams (minimum of 0.01 oz and 1 gram increments), a tare function and auto shut off to save battery life. Digital scales are available almost anywhere these days so do shop around and compare not just price but features.
A long auto-shut off timer is also helpful so your weight doesn’t vanish on you while you go grab that next ingredient. Many scales auto shut off after about 20 – 30 seconds of inactivity which I personally find a tad too short. If you can find a scale that shuts off after closer to 60 seconds, it will be much more convenient although such scales are a bit harder to locate. If you can’t, it’s still better to have one with a 30 second shut off than not have a scale at all.
What of smaller amounts like teaspoons? Personally, I’ll keep them in tsp or Tbsp as noted since the amounts are rather minute relative to the whole dough and a difference in one gram more or less won’t really affect the overall recipe in any discernible way.
DeQuincy Gardens
Thank you for this very informative post…I just got asked that very same question today. In teaching my bread classes, people want exact amounts and a scale is the way to go. I just purchased a Salter digital scale for $20 at the local Ross store, which I am very satisfied with. Weights, like you said, are a good way to start the recipe ~ then adjust according to atmospheric conditions and type of flour.
Do these things keep you awake at night? I’m all for doing away with measuring cups and printing all recipes in weights.
@ Anne Marie: Yes, actually, they do! I do a fair bit of this blogging stuff in the wee hours
Thank you for digging into this! I had noticed the discrepancy in some of the same books. I’m working on a cookbook and plan to list ingredients in grams and cups. I sometimes wonder how much push back I’ll get from a future publisher.
Then, there’s also the difference in weight between whole wheat flour and bread flour and no apparent agreement on that either!
@Chris: This is in no way presented as “in depth” research, just me gleaning and figuring stuff based on a quick perusal of what info I have at hand. So in effect, one can take my results and add them to the list of inconsistent measures for a up of bread flour.
Go on the internet and look up tables of ‘standard kitchen ingredient weights’ (and there are several) and you’ll see they’re all over the place too. I’d expect this is too ‘fluid’ an ingredient to pin down. Different flours from different manufacturers from different regions, even if they are all labelled “Bread Flour” are going to vary, although a 50% variance may be a little much. The final aim is most usually the dough consistency so even if everyone was OK saying “1 cup = X oz or Y grams” the baker standing in their own kitchen using their specific flour still needs to “adjust as necessary”.
But it would still be nice to have a set base amount everyone is OK with as useful for most everyone everywhere. Seeing weights ranging anywhere from 3.8 oz to 5.5 oz is just flat out confusing.
As for your book publisher balking, I can’t see the logic. It’s easy enough to include three values , cups, oz and grams or preferably grams, oz and cups, thereby relegating volumes to a “third choice” status. Yes, that would be a bit of a psychological game. I might even go with something similar to Maggie Glezer’s take:
Bread flour: 350 gr, 12.3 oz, about 2.75 cups
where she makes a point of the volume amount being approximate is every recipe
Then just let the reader pick which version they prefer. Then, adding short explanation in the intro for the use of all three measures and a statement of what you assumed a cup weighed should suffice.
And yes, different flour types like whole wheat, rye, etc. are a whole ‘nuther ball of wax. Another reason to ditch volumes and simply go with weight.
Although it’s a fact that there’s a great reluctance to change off the volume system despite it’s clear shortcomings, this shouldn’t preclude the promotion of a better one. Just as a large swath of people won’t buy a recipe book without cups, many bakers would skip over one without weights.
Good luck with the book, BTW!