Handy Toolshelf

Yogurt: Cups to Grams

A cup of plain yogurt is 227 g — once you've dealt with the puddle of whey sitting on top of the tub.

1 cup plain yogurt = 227 g (King Arthur Baking Ingredient Weight Chart).
Decimals (2.5), fractions (1/2) and mixed numbers (1 3/4) all work.
—
—

First, deal with the liquid on top

Open a fresh tub of plain yogurt and there is usually a spoonful of clear liquid — whey — pooled on the surface. It is not spoilage; it separates naturally while the yogurt sits. For measuring, stir it back in before you touch the cup. The chart figure of 227 g per cup describes ordinary stirred yogurt, whey included, and stirring also evens out the texture so the first cup from the tub matches the last. Pouring the whey off first gives you a thicker, slightly different product — closer to strained yogurt — and then the published figure no longer describes what is in your cup.

Yogurt clings. Spoon it into the cup, level with a knife, and expect a film to stay behind on every surface it touched; for baking, the cleaner method is to set the mixing bowl on a scale and spoon yogurt straight into it until the display reads the grams you need. The converter above runs in both directions for exactly that workflow: pick grams-to-cups when a recipe is written in cups but you are weighing.

Plain, Greek-style, and what this chart does and doesn't say

The King Arthur chart lists one entry — "Yogurt" — at 227 g per cup, and that is the figure this page converts. It sits alongside the site's other soft dairy: sour cream, ricotta, cream cheese, mascarpone and pumpkin purée are all charted at the same 227 g per cup, which makes the dairy shelf of the converter unusually easy to swap around by weight.

Greek-style and other strained yogurts are made by removing whey, which concentrates the yogurt — a spoonful is thicker and heavier-going than the same spoonful of regular yogurt. Our sources do not publish a separate strained-yogurt cup weight, so this site doesn't invent one. If a recipe was developed with Greek yogurt and gives cups, the practical approach is to weigh out the same grams this page gives for plain yogurt — the totals will be close, because the recipe's author was also working to a cup of roughly this weight — and note that the batter will be a little thicker.

Frequently asked questions

How many grams is 1 cup of yogurt?

227 grams for plain yogurt, per the King Arthur Baking Ingredient Weight Chart. Stir the whey on top back in before measuring so the cup matches the charted product.

Should I pour off the liquid on top of yogurt before measuring?

Stir it in instead. The published weight assumes ordinary stirred yogurt with its whey. Pouring the whey off makes the yogurt thicker and more concentrated, so the cup no longer matches the figure.

How many grams is a cup of Greek yogurt?

Our sources publish one yogurt figure — 227 g per cup for plain yogurt — and no separate Greek-style weight, so this site doesn't print one. Greek yogurt is strained and denser per spoonful; for a cup-written recipe, weighing out 227 g is the closest consistent approach.

Can I swap yogurt and sour cream by weight?

On this chart, yes: plain yogurt and sour cream are both listed at 227 g per cup, so a gram-for-gram swap keeps the recipe's totals where the author put them. Flavour and acidity differ, but the weight math is identical.

Data sources: King Arthur Baking Ingredient Weight Chart and USDA FoodData Central. Weights are per US customary cup (236.588 mL); other cup sizes are scaled by volume ratio. See the data sources & method page for how values were chosen.