Table Salt: US cups to kilograms

Salt is the single most miscalculated ingredient in cooking, and the reason is that the word "salt" refers to at least four different ingredients with three different densities. A teaspoon of table salt weighs approximately six grams. A teaspoon of Morton kosher salt weighs five grams. A teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt weighs three grams. A teaspoon of Maldon flake salt weighs two grams. A recipe written by a cook using Diamond Crystal that gets converted to grams using table salt density will be three times too salty.

This matters more than any other ingredient conversion because salt is detectable down to a fraction of a gram. A baked good with twelve grams of salt instead of four is inedible. A pot of soup with the same error is borderline poisonous. There is no other common kitchen ingredient where a three-fold error in conversion produces a result this dramatic.

The single most common mistake is treating all salt as the same. American cookbooks written before the kosher salt revival of the 1990s assumed table salt. Modern American restaurant cookbooks, especially anything from a chef who learned in a professional kitchen between 2000 and 2020, almost certainly assumed Diamond Crystal kosher. European recipes typically assume fine sea salt, which is denser than kosher but lighter than American table salt. Recipes that say only "salt" without specifying are dangerous to convert by volume.

The fix is to weigh salt whenever the quantity matters, which is almost always. One teaspoon of table salt is six grams. If a recipe says "1 teaspoon salt" and you are using Diamond Crystal kosher, scoop until the scale reads 6 grams, which will be roughly two teaspoons. If you are using Morton kosher, 6 grams is closer to 1.25 teaspoons. The volume measurement is meaningless without knowing the salt type, but the weight is universal.

Density matters most for salt in baking, where the salt percentage in dough is calibrated to the flour weight at around 1.5 to 2 percent. A loaf of bread made with 500 grams of flour and 10 grams of salt is correct. The same loaf made with 10 grams of Diamond Crystal kosher measured by the volume the recipe specified would have around 16 grams of salt and would be unpleasant. The same loaf made with 10 grams worth of table salt measured by the volume of Diamond Crystal would have 3 grams and would taste flat.

In cured and brined applications the percentage is even more important. A dry brine for a turkey calls for around 1 percent salt by meat weight, which is 50 grams of salt for a 5 kilogram bird. Using a volume measurement that assumes the wrong salt density can swing the actual quantity from 25 to 100 grams, which is the difference between a perfectly seasoned bird and a bird that has been pulled from the brine three days early because it has crossed into preservation territory.

Iodized salt versus non-iodized is a separate question from density. The iodine content of American table salt is around 0.01 percent by weight, which is too low to taste in most applications but high enough to react with certain pickling brines and produce off flavors. Non-iodized table salt has the same density as iodized and converts identically.

Pickling salt and canning salt are similar to table salt in density but lack the anti-caking agents that keep table salt flowing freely. The anti-caking compounds in iodized table salt can cloud pickle brine but do not change the salt density meaningfully. The density figure on this page applies to both.

Sea salts vary widely. Fine sea salt is similar to table salt at around 280 to 290 grams per cup. Flake sea salt is much lighter at around 130 grams per cup. Coarse sea salt sits between the two at around 220. The site has separate pages for each major salt type because the density variance is too large to handle with variants on a single page.

This page is specifically for fine-ground table salt, the white salt that comes in a paper canister with a metal spout. If you are converting a recipe and you are not certain which salt the recipe assumed, the safe move is to weigh, then add small amounts and taste before committing.