Cups to Tablespoons

16 tablespoons. One US cup is defined as 16 US tablespoons, and one tablespoon is 3 teaspoons, so a cup is also 48 teaspoons and 8 fluid ounces.

Because all of those are volume measurements, the ingredient makes no difference. Sixteen level tablespoons of cocoa powder fill a cup exactly as sixteen level tablespoons of vegetable oil do. The only way the ingredient enters the picture is if you also want to know the weight, which is a different question and a different tool.

6 tablespoons. Three quarters of a cup is 12 tablespoons, so half of it is 6 tablespoons. Written as a cup fraction it would be three eighths of a cup, which is why nobody can find it on a measuring cup. Reach for a tablespoon instead.

If you would rather stay in cups, ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons is the same thing and uses one fewer scoop.

2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons. A third of a cup is 16 teaspoons, and half of that is 8 teaspoons, which is 2 tablespoons with 2 teaspoons left over. There is no cup fraction for it, since one sixth of a cup is not a mark on anything.

This is the single most common place a halved recipe goes wrong. People eyeball halfway up the ⅓ cup line, which is roughly accurate for a liquid and quite badly off for anything that mounds.

No. Cups and tablespoons both measure volume, so the ratio between them is fixed at 16 to 1 no matter what you put in them. This is genuinely one of the simplest conversions in the kitchen, and any site that asks you to pick an ingredient for it is overcomplicating things.

Where the ingredient matters is any conversion that crosses from volume into weight. A cup of flour is about 125 g and a cup of honey is about 340 g, so grams to cups has to ask. So does the weight side of cups to ounces.

Convert every cup measure into teaspoons first, divide by three, then rebuild the answer out of cups, tablespoons and teaspoons. That sounds tedious, which is exactly why the chart above exists. A third of ¾ cup is ¼ cup. A third of ½ cup is 2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons. A third of 1 cup is ⅓ cup.

Two warnings. Eggs do not divide neatly, so beat one egg, weigh it, and use a third of the weight, or scale the recipe to a number of whole eggs instead. And a third of a teaspoon of baking soda or salt cannot be measured with a normal spoon set, so round to the nearest real spoon and accept the small error, or weigh it.

Almost, with one famous exception. A US tablespoon is 14.79 ml, and the UK, Canada and New Zealand all use a 15 ml tablespoon, which is a difference of about 1.4% and invisible in practice. An Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, which is four teaspoons rather than three.

That matters when a recipe uses several tablespoons of something powerful, such as baking powder, cornstarch or a spice. An Australian recipe calling for 2 tablespoons means 40 ml, which is 2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons on a US spoon set. Teaspoons are 5 ml almost everywhere, including Australia, so they are safe.

3 teaspoons in a US or UK tablespoon. Australia is the exception at 4 teaspoons per tablespoon.

This is the conversion worth memorizing, because it rescues most halving problems. Anything that will not divide cleanly in cups will usually divide cleanly once you drop it into teaspoons.

Because 0.375 cups is not something you can measure. Measuring cups come marked in quarters and thirds, and measuring spoons come in whole tablespoons and in teaspoons down to an eighth. An answer that cannot be scooped is not an answer.

So this tool snaps every result to a measurement that exists, then writes it as a sequence you can perform in order, such as ½ cup plus 2 tablespoons. When the snap is not exact, the result is marked about instead of pretending to a precision your kitchen does not have.