· 7 min read · Ali Raza
How Much Salt Is a Teaspoon? A Precise Conversion Guide
One level teaspoon of fine table salt weighs about 6.0 grams — the heaviest common dry ingredient by the spoonful. But Diamond Crystal kosher salt is only 2.8 g per teaspoon and Morton kosher is 4.8 g. Same substance, more than double the weight, purely because of crystal shape.
Convierte mientras lees
La misma calculadora que en las páginas de herramientas: elige un ingrediente y se actualiza mientras escribes.
Azúcar granulada · 10 gramos equivale a
2,38cucharaditas
La opción por defecto cuando una receta dice solo «azúcar». Es suelta, así que no hay que compactarla.
Fórmula: gramos ÷ 4,2 = cucharaditas
Se calcula en tu navegador: no se envía ni se guarda nada.
Cucharaditas rasas
1 cdta. de azúcar granulada = 4,2 g
Una cucharadita rasa de azúcar granulada (blanca) pesa aproximadamente 4,2 gramos, a partir de una densidad aparente de 0.8525 gramos por mililitro y una cucharadita estadounidense de 4.93 mililitros.
The single most consequential difference in an American kitchen
Every salt in your cupboard is sodium chloride. Chemically they are identical. What differs is how the crystals are formed, and that changes how they stack in a spoon — by more than a factor of two.
Table salt is milled into tiny dense cubes that pack with almost no air between them: 6.0 g per teaspoon. Diamond Crystal kosher salt is made by a process that produces hollow, flaky pyramids which stack loosely and trap air: 2.8 g. Morton kosher salt is rolled flat rather than hollow, landing in between at 4.8 g. Fine sea salt behaves much like table salt at 5.5 g.
The practical consequence: a recipe developed with Diamond Crystal and made with Morton, measured by volume, comes out about 70% saltier. Made with table salt, it comes out more than twice as salty. This is not a subtle difference that only a chef would notice — it is the difference between seasoned and inedible.
Converting grams of salt to teaspoons
Divide the grams by the figure for your salt. For table salt that is 6.0, and going the other way — salt tsp to g — you multiply by the same number.
- 1 g of table salt = 0.17 tsp — about a generous pinch.
- 5 g = 0.83 tsp.
- 10 g = 1.67 tsp table salt, but 3.6 tsp Diamond Crystal.
- 20 g = 3.33 tsp table salt, 4.2 tsp Morton, 7.1 tsp Diamond Crystal.
- 1 tsp = 6.0 g table salt, 4.8 g Morton kosher, 2.8 g Diamond Crystal.
- 1 tbsp = 18.0 g table salt, since 3 teaspoons make 1 tablespoon.
Salt is not sodium
Nutrition labels report sodium in milligrams. Salt is only about 39% sodium by weight — the rest is chloride — so the two numbers are not interchangeable, and confusing them produces an error of more than two and a half times.
One gram of table salt supplies roughly 390 mg of sodium. The commonly cited 2,300 mg daily sodium limit therefore corresponds to about 5.8 g of salt, or just under one level teaspoon of table salt. Stated the other way: a single level teaspoon of table salt is roughly a full day's sodium allowance.
If you are converting for health reasons rather than cooking, check which of the two figures your source is giving you before doing any arithmetic.
When volume measurement is not good enough
Kosher and flaked salts are genuinely hard to measure by volume. Their weight per teaspoon depends on how the flakes happen to settle, and tapping or shaking the spoon can change the reading by several percent. For seasoning to taste this does not matter. For anything ratio-based it does.
Brining, curing, fermenting and bread-making all treat salt as a percentage of the total weight of water, meat or flour. Errors there compound across the whole batch rather than averaging out, and the recipe has no opportunity to be corrected by taste along the way. These should be weighed, without exception.
Coarse sea salt and flaky finishing salts vary too widely between producers for any single reference figure to be honest. If a recipe specifies a weight of coarse salt, weigh it.
What "a pinch" actually means
A pinch is conventionally taken as about 1/16 of a teaspoon — roughly 0.4 g of table salt. A dash is around 1/8 teaspoon, and a smidgen about 1/32.
These are conventions rather than standards, and they vary with the size of the hand doing the pinching. They are useful shorthand for "a small amount, adjust to taste" and useless as a precise instruction. If a recipe means a specific quantity, it will give you one.