Good Cooking since 1995

Site Search

Metric Units and Their Equivalents

The metric system of measurement is a very organized system. It's a decimal-based system of measurement and means that all the units are based on powers of 10. For cooking, the most used metric units are grams and kilograms for weight, milliliters and liters for liquid volume and centimeters for thickness (length) sizes which is important for cutting, dicing and slicing. In cooking you will rarely see any cuts made over 2 inches, excuse me, that's 5.08 cm! In baking it's common to see measures above 2 inches, such as the size of tart tins and cake pans. A 25 cm spring-form pan is 10 inches.

How many times have you tried to prepare a recipe only to realize that it needs to be converted from grams to teaspoons? Then after all of that the oven temperature is listed in celsius not Fahrenheit. Do you need to add 10 milliliters of vanilla to a cake batter? If you're math-challenged, don't worry, goodcooking.com is here to help!

US Weight Measure to Metric

In cooking and baking it is important to measure accurately, but to be honest 1 or 2 grams won't make a difference in most recipes and formulas, more than 2 grams will. A few exceptions might be with yeast, salt, baking powder, baking soda, cream of tartar and spices. Don't be too concerned with flour, potatoes, meats, fish, fruits and vegetables.

Liquid Metric Measures

Liquid measures that chefs and bakers use most often are milliliters, centiliters and liters. We don't use the others often. In wine making, because of quantity, you often see the measure of hectoliter. All measures in the metic system are based on the scale of 1, 10, 100 and 1,000. You can get scientific and carry the decimal points, for example 3.4 g of flour or 14.7 g of butter but that is rarely done in the kitchen or bakeshop. In many cases cooking measures of weight and volume are often rounded up or down to the next closest amount. For sugar, flour and some other dry ingredients 4g would be rounded to 5g and 12g would be rounded down to 10g. If you have ever worked with a gram scale you know it's hard to measure 1 gram exactly.

milliliter = one thousandth of a liter
centiliter = one hundredth of a liter
deciliter = one tenth of a liter
liter = (33.8 fluid ounces US)
decaliter = equal to 10 liters
hectoliter = a hundred liters