Butter: milliliters to US cups

Butter is the only common baking ingredient where the volume measurement was engineered to match a specific weight. The American butter stick is shaped to fit the cup measurement system, which means converting butter is unusually clean as long as you know which physical form of butter the recipe is referencing.

One US cup of butter equals 227 grams, which equals half a US pound, which equals 2 standard American butter sticks of 113 grams each. Each stick is also 8 tablespoons, marked on the wax paper wrapper for direct measurement. The wrappers are accurate enough that you can cut along a tablespoon line and trust the resulting weight to within a gram or two. This is the rare case where volume, weight, and pre-portioned mass all line up neatly.

The single most common conversion mistake with butter is misreading European recipes, which often specify butter in grams without telling you which form to start with. A French recipe asking for "100 grams of butter, melted" expects you to weigh the butter while still solid, then melt it. The volume of the melted butter is not the same as the volume of the solid butter, but the weight is. Volume measurement of melted butter introduces a noticeable error because trapped air escapes during melting and the liquid butter occupies slightly less volume than the solid block. Always weigh butter cold whenever weight is the specified measurement.

Butter is sold in different stick geometries depending on where you are. The American Eastern stick is short and stubby at 4.75 inches long. The American Western stick is longer and thinner at 5.25 inches. Both weigh 113 grams. European blocks are typically 250 grams and rectangular, with no internal markings. Australian and UK butter is usually sold in 250 or 500 gram blocks and the recipes assume metric measurement. If you are working from a UK recipe that calls for "100g butter," do not try to convert to tablespoons. Cut a 100 gram piece off the block by weight or by proportion of the package.

Density matters most for butter in laminated dough work, in cookies, and in recipes where the fat-to-flour ratio determines tenderness. Croissants and puff pastry depend on the butter forming continuous sheets between flour layers, which means the fat content has to be precise. A recipe calling for 200 grams of butter that you measured as one cup will give you 227 grams instead, an extra fifteen percent of fat that pushes the laminated dough toward greasy rather than crisp. Drop cookies are more forgiving but still detectable. American chocolate chip cookies made with one stick of butter spread differently than the same recipe made with one cup, because one stick is 113 grams and one cup is 227.

Salted versus unsalted is a separate question from density. American salted butter contains around 1.5 percent salt by weight, which is meaningful in baking. Substituting salted for unsalted butter in a 200 gram recipe adds three grams of salt, which is roughly half a teaspoon. Most baking recipes assume unsalted butter and add salt separately to control the total. If you are using salted butter in an unsalted recipe, reduce the added salt by about a quarter teaspoon per stick of butter.

Clarified butter and ghee have a slightly higher density than whole butter because the milk solids and water have been removed, leaving pure butterfat. One cup of ghee is closer to 220 grams. For most recipes the difference does not matter, but in Indian baking and in some pastry applications where ghee replaces butter directly, a one-for-one cup substitution will leave you slightly short on weight.

The site defaults to USDA whole butter at 227 grams per cup. If you are working from a recipe that uses sticks or tablespoons, the cup-stick-tablespoon ratios above are exact and you do not need to convert through the calculator.