About dishscale

The problem it solves

Most unit converters treat a cup as a fixed weight, or quietly assume everything has the density of water. That is fine for millilitres and useless for baking. A cup of all-purpose flour weighs about 120 g. A cup of honey weighs about 336 g. A cup of rolled oats weighs about 89 g. Same cup, nearly four times the spread.

dishscale converts ingredient by ingredient, so “200 g of flour” and “200 g of honey” give different answers in cups, tablespoons and teaspoons — because they are different answers.

Where the numbers come from

Every ingredient stores exactly one measured value: how many grams fill one US cup. Everything else — millilitres, ounces, tablespoons, teaspoons, the displayed density — is derived from that single number, so the volume answer and the weight answer cannot contradict each other.

• Dry goods, grains and fats follow the King Arthur Baking ingredient weight chart, the most widely used published reference for how much a cup of a baking ingredient actually weighs.
• Liquids follow USDA FoodData Central, i.e. true density × 236.588 ml. King Arthur is not used for liquids because it lists milk, cream, yogurt, sour cream, water and vegetable oil all at exactly 227 g per cup — that is the eight-fluid-ounce baking shorthand, not a measurement.

Each ingredient records which source its weight came from, so any number here can be checked against the reference it claims.

What is on the site

• An ingredient converter covering 30 ingredients across grams, ounces, millilitres, cups, tablespoons and teaspoons, showing every unit at once.
• A Celsius ↔ Fahrenheit converter with an oven-setting reference.
• A recipe scaler that reads real recipe quantities — including “1 1/2 cups” and “½ tsp” — and scales them between serving counts.
• 420 conversion pages, one for each ingredient and unit pair, each showing a worked example and the source for that ingredient's weight.

Who built this

dishscale is made by one person, in a real kitchen, largely out of irritation. I was halving a recipe, hit “1 cup of honey,” and every converter I tried handed me the same number it had just given me for flour. Honey is nearly three times heavier. So I went and found the published weights, wrote them all down, and built the thing I had wanted in the first place. It gets maintained the same way it got made: slowly, one ingredient at a time, and corrected the moment someone shows me a better source.

Corrections

If a number here disagrees with a source you trust, that is worth knowing about — the whole point of the site is that its figures are checkable. Get in touch on the contact page.