Teaspoons to Grams: A Quick Reference for Home Bakers

All figures assume a US legal teaspoon of 4.93 millilitres, filled and swept level. This is the tsp-to-g direction: to convert teaspoons to grams, multiply by the figure; to convert grams to teaspoons, divide by it.

Most baking measurements are fractions of a teaspoon rather than whole ones, and these are the fractions that appear in recipes because they are the spoons people own.

Baking soda: ¼ tsp is 1.2 g, ½ tsp is 2.4 g, ¾ tsp is 3.6 g.

Table salt: ¼ tsp is 1.5 g, ½ tsp is 3.0 g, ¾ tsp is 4.5 g.

Active dry yeast: ¼ tsp is 0.8 g, ½ tsp is 1.6 g, ¾ tsp is 2.3 g.

Granulated sugar: ¼ tsp is 1.1 g, ½ tsp is 2.1 g, ¾ tsp is 3.2 g.

A pinch is conventionally 1/16 teaspoon and a dash 1/8. They are shorthand for "adjust to taste", not instructions you should try to hit precisely.

A tablespoon is exactly 3 teaspoons and a US cup is exactly 48. Both are clean multiples, so the whole reference list extends without any new data.

Recipes give weights and kitchens have spoons, so this is the direction most people actually need. Divide the grams by the per-teaspoon figure. The amounts that come up repeatedly, worked out:

Twenty-one numbers is more than anyone will remember. Three groups is manageable, and it is enough to sanity-check any conversion you see.

The light band, around 1.8 to 2.5 g per teaspoon: cocoa powder, cornstarch, powdered sugar, flour, ground spices. These are milled fine and hold a great deal of air. If a conversion tells you a teaspoon of one of these weighs 5 g, it is using the wrong ingredient.

The middle band, around 3.1 to 4.2 g: yeasts, Diamond Crystal kosher salt, baking powder, granulated sugar. This is where most baking ingredients sit and where the generic "about 4 g per teaspoon" rule of thumb comes from.

The heavy band, around 4.6 to 7.0 g: brown sugar, baking soda, butter, water, milk, the fine salts, honey. Dense materials with little trapped air, or liquids, which have none at all.

Two things follow. The first is that fineness does not predict weight. Cocoa and table salt are both fine powders and they sit at opposite ends of the range, 1.8 g against 6.0 g. What decides the figure is whether the particles nest together or bridge across one another, and that is a matter of shape rather than size.

The second is that the bands tell you when a conversion has gone wrong without your needing to remember the exact number. If a tool says a teaspoon of flour is 5 g, it has used the wrong ingredient — flour is a light-band ingredient at 2.6 g and nothing will move it into the heavy band. That single check catches most silent conversion errors.

They are derived, not measured in your kitchen, and the honest precision is one decimal place.

Each figure comes from a bulk density in grams per millilitre multiplied by the 4.92892 mL of a US legal teaspoon. Granulated sugar's density of 0.85 g/mL gives 4.2 g; table salt's 1.22 g/mL gives 6.0 g. Publishing more decimals would imply an accuracy the underlying data does not have.

Real weights vary a few percent with brand, humidity, granule size and how long the box has been sitting. Flour and cocoa vary more than that, because they respond so strongly to handling. The figures here assume spooned and levelled measurement, which is the convention every recipe implicitly uses.

Some entries are more trustworthy than others, and it is worth knowing which. Granulated sugar at 4.2 g and table salt at 6.0 g are close to universal — the crystals are manufactured to a consistent size and the material does not compress. Water at 4.9 g and the oils near 4.5 g are physics rather than convention. These you can rely on.

Flour at 2.6 g, cocoa at 1.8 g and powdered sugar at 2.5 g are the least stable, because all three respond strongly to sifting, settling and how the spoon is filled. Treat them as central estimates with several percent of spread on either side, and prefer a scale whenever the quantity is large enough for a scale to resolve it.

Where a number is genuinely unreliable — coarse sea salt, flaky finishing salt, grated cheese — the right answer is not a more precise table but a scale.

Two practical habits make the list usable rather than merely correct.

First, convert before you start. Read the recipe through, do every gram-to-teaspoon conversion at the counter, and write the teaspoon figures in the margin. Converting mid-bake is when errors happen, because you are rushed and your hands are dirty.

Second, round to something you can actually measure. If the arithmetic gives 2.26 teaspoons of active dry yeast, what you are going to do is measure 2¼ teaspoons, because that is what a spoon set can express. Knowing the exact figure tells you which way to round, and for the small, potent ingredients that is the useful part.

Round in the safe direction when the ingredient is potent. Under-salting is correctable at the table and over-salting is not, so 1.67 teaspoons of table salt should become a scant 1¾ rather than a generous one. Under-leavening produces a slightly denser cake; over-leavening produces one that rises and collapses, so the same logic applies to baking soda. Yeast is the exception — a small excess only speeds the rise, which you can manage by watching the dough.

And check the plausibility of the answer against the recipe. Salt and chemical leavening in a standard batter each sit around 1-2% of the flour weight. If a conversion hands you a number far outside that, the error is upstream of the arithmetic.