Milliliters to Grams Converter

Water is commonly approximated as 1 g/mL for cooking, but density changes slightly with temperature. Other ingredients differ much more: olive oil is about 0.92 g/mL, honey about 1.42 g/mL, and sifted flour about 0.529 g/mL. Use the ingredient's density when converting between mass and volume.

The same all-purpose flour goes from 0.529 g/mL (sifted, aerated) to 0.59 g/mL (packed, compressed), an 11.5 percent density difference. If a recipe calls for 1 cup (240 mL) of flour and you scoop straight from the bag (packed), you get about 142 g. If you sift first and spoon it into the cup (sifted), you get about 127 g. That 15 g gap is roughly 6 percent extra flour in every cup, which is exactly why cookies come out dry, biscuits come out tough, and cakes come out heavy when you skip the sifting step on a recipe that called for sifted flour. Professional bakers measure by weight (grams on a kitchen scale) precisely to bypass this volume ambiguity, and most modern recipe sites now publish both volume and weight for that reason.

Honey is about 80 percent sugar (fructose, glucose, sucrose, maltose) by mass and only about 17 to 18 percent water, plus trace minerals and acids. Dissolved sugar packs more mass into the same volume than pure water, so the density rises to about 1.42 g/mL (raw honey ranges from roughly 1.38 to 1.45 depending on water content and crystallization). That density is what makes honey a useful refractometer reference for beekeepers checking moisture content, and it is the reason a tablespoon of honey weighs about 21 g while a tablespoon of water weighs only 15 g. The same logic applies to maple syrup (about 1.33 g/mL), corn syrup (about 1.38 g/mL), and concentrated fruit juices: more dissolved sugar means more grams per mL.

Olive oil and most cooking oils (vegetable, canola, sunflower) sit around 0.91 to 0.92 g/mL because triglyceride molecules pack less densely than water molecules. Water is small (H2O, 18 g/mol) and forms tight hydrogen-bond networks; triglycerides are long branched lipids (typically 850 to 900 g/mol per molecule) that take more volume per unit mass. That density gap is why oil and vinegar separate (oil floats), why olive oil pours from a bottle slightly slower than water (higher viscosity at lower density), and why 100 mL of olive oil weighs only 92 g. Melted butter is even lighter at about 0.911 g/mL because the milk fats expand on melting. For nutrition-label math, remember oils are about 9 kcal/g, so 100 mL of olive oil delivers roughly 828 kcal.

Three things stack up. First, the US legal cup is exactly 240 mL, the US customary cup is approximately 236.588 mL, and the metric cup is exactly 250 mL. Second, the conversion from mL to grams depends on density. Third, how you fill the cup changes packing. A 1-cup measure of flour can vary enough to affect baking, so weigh dry ingredients in grams when ratios matter.