About GramChef

GramChef is a kitchen conversion reference for people who cook from recipes written in someone else's measuring system. A Danish recipe asks for 2 dl of flour, an American one asks for a cup, a British one asks for 150 g — and unless you know what flour actually weighs, those are not interchangeable.

The site is bilingual by design. Danish recipes measure dry goods in decilitres; English-language recipes use cups. Those are genuinely different habits, not translations of each other, so the Danish and English sides of the site are written separately rather than machine-translated.

How the numbers are calculated

Every volume-to-weight conversion on this site is derived from the ingredient's density in grams per millilitre, not from a generic lookup table. Water is the reference point at 1.0 g/ml. Plain flour is roughly 0.53 g/ml, granulated sugar about 0.85, honey about 1.42. This is why one cup of flour and one cup of honey differ by more than a factor of two in weight, and why any converter that treats a cup as a fixed number of grams is wrong for most ingredients.

Volume units follow the US customary cup of 240 ml, with tablespoons at 15 ml and teaspoons at 5 ml. A metric cup is 250 ml — about 4% larger — and Australian tablespoons are 20 ml rather than 15. Where that difference matters, the page says so.

Oven temperatures convert between Celsius, Fahrenheit and gas mark. Fan or convection ovens generally run about 20°C hotter than their dial suggests, so a fan setting is listed alongside the conventional one.

Why we keep telling you to use a scale

Volume measurements for dry ingredients are inherently imprecise. How much flour fits in a cup depends on whether you scooped it or spooned it, whether the flour was compacted in the bag, and how humid your kitchen is. The spread between a lightly spooned cup and a firmly packed one can be 20% or more — enough to change a cake.

Every figure here is a good working approximation, and for most cooking that is entirely sufficient. For baking, where ratios matter, weighing on a digital scale will always beat converting. We would rather tell you that than pretend a conversion is more precise than it is.

Corrections

If a density looks wrong or a page contains an error, we want to know. Errors on a reference site compound quietly, and a wrong number here could ruin someone's dinner. See the contact page.