Baking Ingredients by Weight

North Americans are the only people on earth that measure baking ingredients by volume: cups, Tablespoons and teaspoons. The rest of the world measures by weight which is significantly more accurate, having more benefit as your recipe scales up into larger quantities.

The advantage of measuring by volume is that it's accurate enough in the small quantities found in home baking recipes. It also makes for quick measuring work because ingredients can be measured and scooped at the same time. That's a great example of American convenience at it's best.

But what do you do when you want pinpoint accuracy and/or you want to scale your recipe up by a factor of 10 for the next Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale? Do that with your recipe that's measured by volume and you're taking a huge gamble. I ended up losing this gamble when I owned my own baking company and scaled in this manner. It took me a while to realize why the consistency of my cookies weren't the same when I went from 20 to 400 cookie batches. 2 cups of sugar suddenly didn't measure out to be 20 cups of sugar like I thought it would once the recipe was scaled. This is where measuring by weight comes to the rescue.

While slightly more cumbersome because you have to measure everything, the beauty of measuring by weight is that your ingredients will always be accurate. Using flour from a different manufacturer or time of year? The 1.5 kilograms that you're measuring out will always equal the same amount of flour. If you own a baking company you're probably always baking different quantities of what you want on hand depending on demand. This is why it's important in these cases to convert your recipes to weight volumes early on so it's easy to scale when you need to. Below is a list of popular ingredients by weight to make this transition as easy as possible. The list below will be updated periodically as more data becomes available.

Chocolates By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
chocolate chips	1 cup	170 grams
cocoa powder	1 cup	85 grams

Fats By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
oil, Vegan Butter, margarine, Vegan Shortening or store bought shortening, water and most liquids	1 cup	215 grams

Flours By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
all-purpose flour	1 cup	128 grams
whole wheat flour	1 cup	128 grams
potato flour	1 cup	181 grams
bread flour	1 cup	128 grams
cornmeal (coarse)	1 cup	170 grams
rye flour (medium)	1 cup	102 grams
rye (pumpernickel)	1 cup	106 grams
quinoa flour	1 cup	110 grams
semolina flour	1 cup	163 grams
sorghum flour	1 cup	138 grams

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Fruits By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
raisins	1 cup	170 grams
raspberries	1 cup	120 grams

Grains By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
rolled oats	1 cup	113 grams
quinoa, whole	1 cup	177 grams
quinoa, cooked	1 cup	184 grams

Leaveners By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
active dry yeast	2 ½ teaspoons	7 grams
instant yeast	2 ¼ teaspoons	7 grams
baking powder	2 Tablespoons	28 grams
baking soda	2 Tablespoons	28 grams
sourdough or wild yeast sponge or barm	1 cup	198 grams

Nuts By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
walnuts, chopped	1 cup	113 grams
walnuts, whole	1 cup	128 grams

Sweeteners By Weight

Ingredient	Measurement	Weight
agave syrup, molasses, maple syrup, barley malt, brown rice syrup, corn syrup	1 ½ Tablespoons	28 grams
granulated sugar	2 Tablespoons	28 grams