ExactCup

Recipe Weight Calculator: Add Up Several Ingredients

Every converter gives you one ingredient at a time. This one adds them together — pick each line in cups, spoons, grams or ounces and get the combined weight of the whole list, plus a running total you can weigh straight into one bowl. Quick answers: 1 cup of rice + 1/2 cup of quinoa = 270 g, 1 cup of flour + 1 cup of sugar = 320 g (not remotely equal halves), and a large egg is 50 g out of its shell.

Amount
Unit
Ingredient
Weight

Ingredient weights are the same verified values used across the site (King Arthur Baking and USDA FoodData Central checked, 80 ingredients). Egg weights are USDA: a large egg is 50 g out of the shell. The arithmetic is exact, but a cup you scoop by hand can be 10–20% off, so read the total as a close estimate rather than a guarantee.

Grams add up. Cups don't.

This is the whole reason a combined-weight tool has to work in grams. Two cups of two different ingredients are not two comparable amounts of anything: across the 80 ingredients on this site a single cup runs from 50 g (panko breadcrumbs) to 340 g (honey) — a 6.8-fold spread. So "three cups of dry ingredients" can honestly mean anything from about 150 g to 1020 g, and no answer box can tell you which.

Volume has a second problem that weight does not: it stops being additive the moment you mix. Sugar dissolves into the milk and takes up almost no space of its own; flour hydrates and packs down; the air you trapped scooping the flour escapes when you stir. A cup of flour plus a cup of milk makes noticeably less than two cups of batter. Weight is conserved — nothing leaves the bowl until the oven takes water out as steam — so grams total exactly, every time, and they are what you can scale, halve or double without error.

Handy for sanity-checking a total: here is the spread of cup weights by category on this site. If your scale reads far outside these bands for a cup of something, the unit or the ingredient is probably wrong rather than the scale.

Category1 cup rangesTypicalEnds of the range
Flours & Starches (14)85–163 g113 gcocoa powder (lightest) → semolina (heaviest)
Sugars & Syrups (13)113–340 g213 gpowdered sugar (lightest) → honey (heaviest)
Dairy & Fats (25)100–306 g227 ggrated parmesan (lightest) → sweetened condensed milk (heaviest)
Baking Ingredients (15)80–170 g142 gshredded coconut (lightest) → chocolate chips (heaviest)
Grains & Misc (13)50–273 g160 gpanko breadcrumbs (lightest) → table salt (heaviest)

Common combinations, added up

The pairs people search for most, with the arithmetic shown. Every figure comes from the verified per-ingredient weight, so these totals match the individual ingredient pages exactly:

CombinationEach partTotalTotal (oz)
1 cup white rice (uncooked) + 1/2 cup quinoa (uncooked)185 g + 85 g270 g9.5 oz
1 cup all-purpose flour + 1 cup granulated sugar120 g + 200 g320 g11.3 oz
2 cups all-purpose flour + 1 cup granulated sugar240 g + 200 g440 g15.5 oz
1 cup all-purpose flour + 1/2 cup cocoa powder120 g + 43 g163 g5.7 oz
1 cup rolled oats + 1 cup all-purpose flour90 g + 120 g210 g7.4 oz
1 cup butter + 1 cup granulated sugar227 g + 200 g427 g15.1 oz
1 cup brown sugar (packed) + 1/2 cup granulated sugar213 g + 100 g313 g11 oz
1 cup milk + 1 large egg240 g + 50 g290 g10.2 oz
1 cup white rice (uncooked) + 1 cup water185 g + 237 g422 g14.9 oz
1 cup chocolate chips + 1 cup chopped nuts170 g + 120 g290 g10.2 oz
1/2 cup peanut butter + 1/2 cup honey128 g + 170 g298 g10.5 oz
1 cup all-purpose flour + 1/2 cup butter + 1/4 cup granulated sugar120 g + 114 g + 50 g284 g10 oz

Cup measures here are the standard US cup (236.6 mL), levelled and unpacked except brown sugar, which is packed as recipes assume.

What a whole recipe weighs

Three ordinary batches, itemised. The running total column is the useful one: put the bowl on the scale, tare once, and add each ingredient until the display reads that number — no measuring cups, no taring between additions.

Chocolate chip cookies

IngredientWeightRunning total
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour270 g270 g
1 cup butter227 g497 g
3/4 cup granulated sugar150 g647 g
3/4 cup brown sugar (packed)160 g807 g
2 large eggs100 g907 g
2 cups chocolate chips340 g1247 g
1 tsp table salt5.7 g1252 g
Total1252 g1.3 kg

1252 g = 44.2 oz = 2.8 lb, from about 7.2 cups of ingredients — about 31 cookies at 40 g each. Baking soda, baking powder, vanilla and spices add only a few grams between them, so they are left off the list.

Pancake batter

IngredientWeightRunning total
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour180 g180 g
1 tbsp granulated sugar13 g193 g
1 1/4 cups milk300 g493 g
1 large egg50 g543 g
3 tbsp butter43 g585 g
1/2 tsp table salt2.8 g588 g
Total588 g20.7 oz

588 g = 20.7 oz = 1.3 lb, from about 3.2 cups of ingredients — about 10 pancakes at 60 g each. Baking soda, baking powder, vanilla and spices add only a few grams between them, so they are left off the list.

Banana bread

IngredientWeightRunning total
2 cups all-purpose flour240 g240 g
1 cup granulated sugar200 g440 g
1/2 cup butter114 g554 g
2 large eggs100 g654 g
1 1/2 cups mashed banana341 g994 g
1/2 cup chopped nuts60 g1054 g
1 tsp table salt5.7 g1060 g
Total1060 g1.1 kg

1060 g = 37.4 oz = 2.3 lb, from about 5.9 cups of ingredients. Baking soda, baking powder, vanilla and spices add only a few grams between them, so they are left off the list.

Two things worth noticing. First, the flour is rarely the biggest number: in the cookie batch above the 2 1/4 cups of flour (270 g) are outweighed by the butter and sugars together, and the chocolate chips alone are 340 g. Second, totals divide into portions: 1252 g of dough is 31 cookies at 40 g, and 588 g of batter is about 10 four-inch pancakes at 60 g a ladle. That is how a bakery gets the same size every time.

Eggs, sticks and the things a cup can't measure

A recipe total always stalls on the ingredients that aren't measured by volume. Eggs come in sizes, and the size is a real weight difference — a jumbo egg carries 25 g more than a small one, so a three-egg cake can swing by 75 g of liquid. US recipes assume large unless they say otherwise. All figures are USDA FoodData Central, out of the shell:

Egg size (US)1 egg2 eggs3 eggs1 egg (oz)
Small38 g76 g114 g1.3 oz
Medium44 g88 g132 g1.6 oz
Large (the recipe default)50 g100 g150 g1.8 oz
Extra large56 g112 g168 g2 oz
Jumbo63 g126 g189 g2.2 oz

Inside a large egg: 33 g of white and 17 g of yolk (USDA) — which is why a recipe calling for two yolks needs only 34 g, and why yolk-heavy recipes are so much richer than the egg count suggests. Beaten whole egg measures 243 g to the cup, so half an egg is 25 g of beaten egg (about 1 tbsp + 2 tsp) — the answer when halving a recipe with an odd egg count — and a cup of egg is just under five large ones.

Butter is the other one. A US stick is 1/2 cup, so 1 stick = 113.5 g, 2 sticks = 227 g and the 1 lb box of four sticks is 454 g. Both are options in the calculator above: choose each (egg/stick) as the unit. For everything else — a pinch of salt, 1/2 tsp of vanilla, the baking soda — the honest answer is that they are worth a few grams and will not move your total; weigh them or spoon them, it makes no difference to the batch.

Weigh the whole list into one bowl

Once you have a running total, the fastest way to bake is to stop measuring altogether. Bowl on the scale, press tare once, then pour each ingredient in until the display reaches the next number on the list. One bowl, one utensil, no cups to wash, and no chance of losing count of how many cups of flour you have added — the commonest way a bake goes wrong.

Two cautions. Overshooting is not reversible: you can spoon 10 g of extra flour back out, but you cannot retrieve 5 g of salt from a bowl of flour, so add the small, potent things (salt, baking soda, spices) separately or last, and pour them from a spoon rather than the box. And if the recipe wants the dry ingredients whisked on their own, or the butter and sugar creamed before anything else joins them, keep those stages in separate bowls — the running total still works, you just run it per bowl. Scaling the batch at the same time? Total it here first, then take the whole list through the recipe scaler: grams scale cleanly where fractional cups do not.

Need a different conversion?

One ingredient at a time: the cups to grams converter covers all 80 ingredients, the grams to cups converter runs it backwards, and tablespoons to grams handles spoon amounts. Whole-chart views by family: flour, sugars and syrups, dairy and fats, grains. Working the other way round — a weight you need to turn back into cups, or a total you want to split across a bread formula? Try the baker's percentage calculator (every ingredient as a percentage of the flour weight) or, for rice and pasta, the dry to cooked converter. And if you are cutting the recipe rather than totalling it, the recipe halving chart shows half of every measure in something you can actually measure.

Frequently asked questions

How much do 1 cup of rice and 1/2 cup of quinoa weigh together?

270 g. A US cup of dry long-grain white rice is 185 g and half a cup of dry quinoa is 85 g (a full cup is 170 g), so together they come to 270 g — about 9.5 oz. Both are dry, unrinsed weights; rinsed grains carry water and weigh more.

How do I work out the total weight of a recipe?

Convert every line to grams, then add. That is the only reliable way, because a cup of one ingredient does not weigh the same as a cup of another — a cup of flour is 120 g while a cup of honey is 340 g. Count eggs at 50 g each (a US large egg out of the shell, per USDA) and butter sticks at 113.5 g. The calculator on this page does the conversion and the addition together, and also prints a running total so you can weigh the whole list into one bowl.

How much do 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of sugar weigh together?

320 g — 120 g of all-purpose flour plus 200 g of granulated sugar. Note how uneven that split is: the two cups look identical in the measuring cup, but the sugar is two thirds heavier. That is the single most common surprise when people start weighing.

Can I just add cups together?

Only to guess at bowl size, never to get a weight. Two problems: each cup weighs something different (on this site a cup ranges from 50 g of panko breadcrumbs to 340 g of honey), and volumes stop being additive as soon as you mix — sugar dissolves into liquid, flour hydrates, and trapped air escapes, so 1 cup of flour plus 1 cup of milk makes visibly less than 2 cups of batter. Weight has neither problem: nothing leaves the bowl, so grams add exactly.

How much do 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of sugar and 2 eggs weigh?

540 g: 240 g of flour, 200 g of sugar and 100 g of egg (two large eggs, shells off). Add the fat and liquid and you have the batter weight for most simple cakes.

How much does a batch of cookie dough weigh?

The standard drop-cookie batch on this page — 2 1/4 cups flour, 1 cup butter, 3/4 cup each of granulated and brown sugar, 2 eggs and 2 cups of chocolate chips — comes to about 1252 g, which is 1.3 kg of dough. Divided into 40 g balls that is roughly 31 cookies, which is how bakeries portion consistently: weigh the dough, divide, scoop by weight.

Half a cup of quinoa says 48 g on my app — is that wrong?

Not wrong, but not the same measurement. Half a cup of dry quinoa is 85 g on a scale (a cup is 170 g). Half a cup of cooked quinoa is about 92.5 g, using the USDA cooked-quinoa cup weight from our dry-to-cooked converter. A figure in the 40s is almost certainly a nutrition serving size rather than the weight of the grain in your measuring cup, so do not use it to weigh with.

Does the weight change when I mix or bake it?

Mixing changes nothing — weight is conserved, which is exactly why totalling grams works. Baking does lose weight, because water leaves as steam: a baked loaf always weighs less than the dough that went into the tin. If that figure matters to you (bakers use it to judge crumb moisture), weigh your own tin before and after rather than trusting a published percentage — it depends on the oven, the shape and the bake time.

How much does 1 stick of butter weigh?

113.5 g, which is 4 oz, 1/2 cup or 8 tablespoons. A full cup of butter is 227 g and a 1 lb box of four sticks is 454 g. The calculator above takes butter in sticks — choose "each (egg/stick)" as the unit. The butter converter page covers sticks, cups, tablespoons and grams in every direction.

Will my mixing bowl hold it?

The calculator totals the volume as well as the weight, and suggests a bowl. The rule of thumb is 1.5 times the ingredient volume so there is room to stir without throwing flour over the counter — and remember 1 quart is 4 cups, so a 5-quart stand mixer bowl is 20 cups. Batters that get whipped or doughs that rise need more headroom than that; doubling is safer for those.

How many grams is 1 cup of mixed dry ingredients?

There is no single answer, which is why this calculator exists. A cup of a flour-and-oats mix lands near 100–115 g; a cup of a flour-and-sugar mix nearer 160 g; a cup of granola with nuts and dried fruit can pass 150 g. The full range across the 80 ingredients on this site is 50 g (panko breadcrumbs) to 340 g (honey) per cup. Weigh the components separately and total them; do not weigh one cup of the mix and multiply.

Is it better to weigh or to measure when the recipe gives both?

Weigh. Cup measures depend on how you fill them: scooping flour straight from the bag compacts it and can add 20–25 g to a cup that should be 120 g, which is a fifth of the flour in the recipe. Grams remove that variable entirely, and they add up — which is the whole point of this page. Convert the recipe once with the cups to grams converter, write the grams in the margin, and weigh from then on.