Tablespoons to Grams

A tablespoon has no weight of its own

A tablespoon measures volume; grams measure weight. How many grams a tablespoon holds depends on what is in it: a level US tablespoon of butter weighs 14.2 grams, of granulated sugar 12.5 grams, of honey 21.2 grams. To turn tablespoons (tbsp) into grams, multiply by the weight of one tablespoon of that ingredient.

The spoon here is the US tablespoon: 1/2 US fluid ounce, 14.8 ml, and by definition 1 US cup = 16 tablespoons = 48 teaspoons. USDA FoodData Central gives one weight per ingredient, and every measure follows from it: a cup of sugar is 200 grams, so a tablespoon is 1/16 of it, 12.5 grams. Baking powder, baking soda, active dry yeast and ground cinnamon USDA lists by the teaspoon, so their tablespoon is 3 teaspoons: 4 grams of active dry yeast a teaspoon, 12 grams a tablespoon.

Three steps

1. Find the weight of one tablespoon of the ingredient — in the table below. For butter it is 14.2 grams.
2. Turn the recipe’s fraction into a number. 1/2 is 0.5, 1/3 about 0.333, 1 1/2 is 1.5 — or simply type the fraction into the calculator as the recipe writes it.
3. Multiply. 2 tablespoons of butter = 2 × 14.1875 ≈ 28.4 grams.

Grams in 1/2, 1 and 2 tablespoons of each ingredient

If the ingredient does not matter yet, start from how many grams 1 tablespoon is — every ingredient at once. The opposite question, how many tablespoons a weight fills, is on the grams to tablespoons page; teaspoons are on teaspoons to grams, cups on cups to grams.

Where this actually comes up

• American recipes on a kitchen scale.2 tablespoons of butter are 28.4 grams — weighing is faster than packing a spoon.
• Honey and syrup.A tablespoon of honey is 21.2 grams; weighing it spares scraping the spoon.
• Oil for a pan. 2 tablespoons of olive oil weigh 27 grams — oil is lighter than water.
• Flour for a sauce. 3 tablespoons of flour are only 23.4 grams: flour is airy, and a spoon of it weighs far less than a spoon of sugar.
• Nutrition labels. Peanut butter is labelled per 2 tablespoons, and 2 tablespoons weigh 32.3 grams by the USDA cup.
• Sour cream and yogurt. 4 tablespoons of sour cream weigh 57.5 grams, of plain yogurt 61.3 grams.

Where USDA’s own spoon weights differ

USDA FoodData Central also lists a tablespoon for some ingredients. This converter does not use those portions — they would make a tablespoon disagree with its own cup — but checks every one against the derived weight and names any gap over 5 %. 11 of them agree within 1.6 %; the 2 that do not are named on their own result pages: unsifted powdered sugar (USDA’s tablespoon 8 grams, here 7.5 grams) and sour cream (USDA’s tablespoon 12 grams, here 14.4 grams). Spoon portions are small, and how full the spoon is moves them more than anything else.

Baking powder and baking soda

A tablespoon of baking powder and a tablespoon of baking soda both weigh 13.8 grams in USDA FoodData Central. Equal weight does not make them interchangeable: baking soda needs an acid in the recipe and is several times stronger, so each keeps its own row and its own pages, and a recipe’s tablespoon of one is never a tablespoon of the other.

Water: a milliliter is a gram

1 ml of water weighs about 1 g, so a US tablespoon of water weighs its own volume, 14.8 grams. For water this calculator uses no table; the same number in milliliters, three teaspoons to the tablespoon, is on the teaspoons to milliliters page. Every other liquid here — milk, oil, cream, honey — uses its USDA weight, because a spoon of it is not a spoon of water.

Where the tablespoon and the gram come from

The tablespoon began as the spoon laid on the table for serving. American cookbooks of the late 19th century, Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 among them, made it a level measure, and the US tablespoon settled at half a fluid ounce, 1/16 of a cup. The gram was defined in France in 1795 as the weight of one cubic centimeter of water at the temperature of melting ice. Converting tablespoons to grams is how an American recipe meets a kitchen scale.

US, metric or Australian tablespoon

This page uses the US tablespoon of 14.8 ml. A recipe from the UK, New Zealand or Canada may mean the metric tablespoon of 15 ml, 1.4 % more — the same for cooking. A recipe from Australia means the tablespoon of 20 ml, 35.3 % more, so its tablespoon of butter weighs about a third more than the US one. Every result page names both figures under the answer. The tablespoon by volume alone is on the tablespoons to cups and cups to tablespoons pages.

Doing it in your head

Three anchors cover most recipes: butter about 14 g a tablespoon, sugar 12.5 g, flour about 8 g. Multiples follow: 2 tablespoons of butter about 28 g, 4 tablespoons of sugar 50 g, 3 tablespoons of flour about 23 g. For anything else, divide the weight of a US cup by 16: a cup of milk at 244 grams gives a tablespoon of 15.3 grams.

Where the weights come from

Every weight on this page except water’s comes from a household portion in USDA FoodData Central, the SR Legacy dataset (the final release of the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference), taken for a level spoon. Each result page names the exact entry — for butter it is USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy entry 173430 “Butter, without salt”, portion “1 cup” = 227 grams, and 1 US cup = 16 US tablespoons. The same cup weights drive cups to grams and grams to cups, so for every ingredient USDA weighs by the cup a tablespoon here is exactly 1/16 of the cup there. A heaped spoon weighs more than a level one; for baking, a kitchen scale is the exact answer.