Picture this: you find a French pastry recipe listing of butter, but your kitchen scale reads in ounces. Or you spot a sale on a block of cheese and wonder how many grams that really is. Weight conversions are one of the most common hurdles in everyday cooking and grocery shopping.
Welcome to lesson three of five in Measurements in the Kitchen. With the first two lessons under your belt — classifying kitchen units and converting between volume units — you already have strong skills on the liquid side of measurement. Now we cross over to the weight side. In this lesson, you will learn how to convert between ounces (oz), pounds (lb), grams (g), and kilograms (kg), both within the same system and across systems. By the end, switching between any of these four units will feel just as natural as the volume conversions you have already practiced.
From the first lesson you know that ounces (oz) and pounds (lb) belong to the US customary system, while grams (g) and kilograms (kg) belong to the metric system. All four appear regularly in kitchens: a US recipe might call for of cream cheese, a package of chicken might be labeled , a European chocolate bar might read , and a bag of flour from an international market might say .
The good news is that the same multiply-or-divide logic we used for volume conversions works here too. We just need a new, short list of equivalences, and the rest is straightforward arithmetic.
Within the US system, ounces and pounds are connected by one key fact:
This means a pound is made up of 16 ounces. To convert pounds to ounces, multiply by 16. To convert ounces to pounds, divide by 16.
Example 1 — Pounds to ounces. A recipe calls for of ground beef. How many ounces is that?
Example 2 — Ounces to pounds. You bought of tomatoes. How many pounds is that?
If the division does not come out evenly, that is perfectly fine. For instance, . You can leave it as a decimal or express it as — whichever is easier for the situation at hand.
On the metric side, grams and kilograms are related by a factor of one thousand:
This mirrors how in volume. To convert kilograms to grams, multiply by . To convert grams to kilograms, divide by . In practice, this simply means moving the decimal point three places.
Example 3 — Kilograms to grams. A bag of rice weighs . In grams:
Example 4 — Grams to kilograms. A block of cheese is labeled . In kilograms:
Because the metric system is built on powers of ten, these conversions tend to be quicker than their US counterparts. There is no need to memorize an odd number like 16 — just shift the decimal.
Now for the part that comes up most often in real life: converting between the two systems. When you buy an ingredient labeled in grams but your recipe uses ounces (or the other way around), you need a bridge. Two approximate equivalences handle nearly every kitchen situation:
| Equivalence | Note |
|---|---|
| Rounded from 28.35 g | |
| Rounded from 453.6 g |
There is also a handy relationship going in the other direction:
You do not need to memorize all three separately. Since and , you can derive the pound equivalence: , which is close to the more precise value of . For everyday cooking, either figure is acceptable. We will use in this lesson because it is the standard rounded value you will see on packaging and in most references.
Let us put those equivalences to work with some realistic scenarios.
Example 5 — Ounces to grams. A cookie recipe calls for of chocolate chips. Using :
You would weigh out about on a metric kitchen scale.
Example 6 — Grams to ounces. A European recipe asks for of butter. Converting to ounces:
Rounding to is perfectly fine for a baking recipe.
Example 7 — Pounds to kilograms. You buy a bag of flour and want to know its metric weight. Using :
This confirms the handy shortcut: .
Example 8 — Kilograms to pounds. A recipe from an Australian cookbook calls for of chicken thighs. Using :
At the grocery store, grabbing about of chicken would be close enough.
Just as we discussed for volume in the previous lesson, perfect precision is rarely needed in the kitchen. Two practical guidelines will serve you well:
The goal, as always, is a number you can actually work with using the tools and packaging in front of you.
In this lesson you learned the key weight equivalences for the kitchen: within the US system, within the metric system, and the cross-system bridges , , and . Together with the volume conversions from lesson two, you now have a complete toolkit for handling almost any measurement a recipe can throw at you.
Up next is a set of hands-on exercises where you will convert within each system, lock in the cross-system equivalences, and apply everything to real grocery and recipe scenarios. Time to put those new conversion skills to the test!