Granulated Sugar: US cups to milliliters

Granulated sugar is the easiest baking ingredient to convert because it does not compress meaningfully. Sugar crystals are hard, regular, and roughly cubic at the scale that matters for measurement. Whether you scoop, spoon, or pour granulated sugar into a measuring cup, the weight changes by only a percent or two. King Arthur, USDA, and the major commercial sugar refiners all converge on 200 grams per US cup, and you can rely on that figure to about half a percent.

This makes sugar a useful sanity check for new bakers. If you are building intuition for what 200 grams looks like, scoop a cup of sugar onto a kitchen scale. The number you see is your reference point for every conversion that follows.

The single most common mistake with sugar conversions is confusing granulated sugar with caster sugar in UK and Australian recipes. Caster sugar is finer than American granulated, with crystals roughly half the size. The smaller crystals pack more tightly, which adds about three to five percent to the weight per cup. A UK recipe calling for 200 grams of caster sugar is asking for slightly less volume than 200 grams of American granulated. The difference is small enough that the recipe will still work, but the texture of the finished product will be subtly different. Caster sugar dissolves faster than granulated, which matters for meringues, mousses, and cold desserts where undissolved crystals leave a gritty mouthfeel.

If a recipe specifies caster sugar and you only have granulated, you can pulse the granulated sugar in a food processor or blender for ten to fifteen seconds to approximate the finer crystal size. Do not pulse longer or you will start producing powdered sugar, which has cornstarch added and behaves differently in dough.

Density matters most for sugar in recipes where the ratio of sugar to flour or sugar to fat determines the final structure. American chocolate chip cookies are a good example. The standard Toll House recipe calls for 0.75 cup of granulated sugar plus 0.75 cup of brown sugar, which is 150 grams of granulated and approximately 160 grams of packed brown. If you accidentally use 200 grams of each because you misread the fraction, the cookies spread thin and crisp instead of staying thick and chewy. The extra sugar lowers the dough viscosity, and the extra moisture from the brown sugar pushes the cookies further into the wet-dough territory.

Sugar conversions also matter for syrups and candy work, where the sugar to water ratio determines the final temperature and texture. A simple syrup at 1 cup sugar to 1 cup water is 200 grams of sugar to 240 grams of water, which is 45 percent sugar by weight. A rich syrup at 2 to 1 by volume is 400 grams of sugar to 240 grams of water, which is 63 percent sugar by weight. Those percentages affect how the syrup behaves in cocktails, fruit preserves, and pastry glazes. Volume measurement is fine for kitchen syrup work, but if you are matching a published candy recipe to a target brix value, weigh the sugar.

The seven-system measurement table on this page accounts for the differences between US, UK, Australian, and Japanese cup sizes. The same 200 grams of sugar fills 0.83 of a UK metric cup, 0.80 of an Australian cup, or exactly 1.00 of a Japanese cup at 240 milliliters. Recipes from each region assume the local cup, so a recipe written in Sydney calling for "1 cup sugar" wants 208 grams, not 200. A Japanese recipe calling for one cup wants 167 grams. These differences accumulate quickly across multiple ingredients in the same recipe.

Brown sugar, powdered sugar, and turbinado sugar are different ingredients with different densities. They are not interchangeable by volume or weight. Substituting brown for white in a cookie recipe changes both the sweetness profile and the moisture content because brown sugar contains roughly three percent molasses by weight.