Applesauce

One US cup of applesauce weighs 244 grams. Going the other way, 100 grams is about 0.41 cups.

Applesauce is cooked, pureed apples, with or without added sugar. In American baking it appears most often as a substitute — a way to reduce oil or eggs in a quick bread or muffin — and the substitution works because applesauce is roughly the same density as water and has similar hydration behaviour to eggs or milk in a batter.

USDA FoodData Central publishes 1 cup of unsweetened canned applesauce at 244 grams (FDC 171695, Applesauce, canned, unsweetened, without added ascorbic acid). That gives a density of 1.0313 grams per millilitre, essentially identical to plain milk. The similarity is not accidental: both are about 88 to 90 percent water with a small amount of dissolved and suspended solids denser than water, and both come out just above water density as a result.

King Arthur's ingredient weight chart publishes 1 cup at 255 grams and 1.0778 grams per millilitre. King Arthur does not specify whether the entry is sweetened or unsweetened. Sweetened applesauce is unsweetened applesauce with added sugar (typically 3 to 5 grams of sucrose or corn syrup per tablespoon), and the added sugar raises the density enough to explain the gap between the two figures. If the King Arthur row is for sweetened applesauce and the USDA row is for unsweetened, both are correct measurements of different products.

The two figures are 4.4 percent apart, inside the 5 percent tolerance we apply to the liquid category. We publish the USDA figure because it is explicitly labelled unsweetened and because most modern baking recipes now call for unsweetened applesauce when they mean it as a substitution ingredient.

Sweetened applesauce (typically labelled 'original' or 'regular' on a supermarket shelf) is heavier per cup than unsweetened. For a recipe that specifies applesauce without saying which type, use the recipe writer's context: healthy-baking, low-sugar and 'apple-sweetened' contexts almost always mean unsweetened; older recipes and traditional applesauce cake usually mean sweetened. When in doubt, weigh — 244 grams for unsweetened, roughly 255 to 260 for sweetened.

Homemade applesauce varies more than either canned figure suggests. Cooked and pressed through a food mill, it can range from 220 grams per cup (loose, with more air) to 260 grams per cup (dense, well-cooked, pressed hard). The variety of apple matters slightly — sweet apples like Fuji produce a slightly denser sauce than tart apples like Granny Smith because of the sugar content — but the difference is usually within the range this entry covers.

Related products not covered here: apple butter, which is applesauce cooked down further until much of the water has evaporated, weighing about 285 grams per cup and containing 45 to 55 percent sugar; apple purée for infants, which is essentially the same as applesauce but often blended smoother; and apple sauce as a savoury condiment for meat, which may include vinegar, mustard or horseradish and behaves differently in a recipe.

FDA regulates applesauce under general food safety and labelling rules and USDA has grading specifications for canned applesauce under Commercial Item Description CID A-A-20155 covering identity, colour, texture and acceptable levels of defects, but neither addresses density. Codex Alimentarius does not have a specific applesauce standard.

The category here is 'liquid' rather than 'sugar' or 'milled' because applesauce behaves as a semi-liquid purée in a measuring cup: it settles into the container, self-levels, and the density is determined by its composition rather than by how it was scooped. The 5 percent liquid category tolerance applies, and both sources sit inside it once the sweetened-versus-unsweetened distinction is accounted for.