Teaspoons to Grams Converter

This conversion matters most for ingredients where recipes traditionally specify teaspoons rather than weight — vanilla extract, spices, and leavening agents rarely appear in gram form on a recipe card, but nutrition labeling, supplement dosing, and scaled commercial baking all require the gram equivalent.

Home cooks following a recipe that specifies salt by weight (a growing trend among chefs who cook professionally with kosher salt) need this conversion to translate back into teaspoons if kosher salt isn't on hand, since table salt and kosher salt differ enough in density that a straight teaspoon swap changes the seasoning level.

Essential oil and flavor extract dosing, both in cooking and in DIY projects like candle- or soap-making, frequently specifies drops or grams rather than teaspoons, making this conversion useful for translating a small, potent ingredient amount into a measurable kitchen-spoon quantity.

Table salt weighs about 6 grams per teaspoon per USDA FoodData Central, but this varies significantly by salt type: Diamond Crystal kosher salt weighs roughly 3g per teaspoon due to its larger, less dense crystal structure, while Morton kosher salt sits closer to 5g — a distinction professional recipe writers increasingly specify by brand.

Leavening agents are the ingredients most sensitive to teaspoon-level measurement error. Baking soda at roughly 4.6g per teaspoon and baking powder at roughly 4g per teaspoon both drive chemical reactions where doubling or halving the amount noticeably changes rise and texture, a relationship documented extensively in baking science resources like 'On Food and Cooking' by Harold McGee.

The metric teaspoon (5ml, used in pharmacology and some international recipes) and the US teaspoon (4.929ml) differ by under 1.5%, small enough that USDA and most cookbook publishers treat them as interchangeable for cooking purposes, unlike the larger US/Australian tablespoon gap.

Herb and spice weight per teaspoon depends heavily on whether the product is fresh, dried, or ground — dried herbs are lighter and more concentrated in flavor by volume than fresh, which is why most recipes calling for a substitution use a 3:1 fresh-to-dried ratio by volume, not by weight.

Instant yeast and active dry yeast both typically weigh close to 3g per teaspoon, per manufacturer packaging data from brands like Red Star and Fleischmann's, though the two forms behave differently in a recipe — instant yeast can be mixed directly into dry ingredients, while active dry yeast is traditionally proofed in warm liquid first.