Bread crumbs

One US cup of bread crumbs weighs 108 grams. Going the other way, 100 grams is about 0.93 cups.

Also called breadcrumbs, dried breadcrumbs, plain breadcrumbs, Italian breadcrumbs, seasoned breadcrumbs.

Sources agree within 3.6%, well inside the 10% tolerance for the milled category. USDA FDC 175003 (Bread crumbs, dry, grated, plain) gives a cup at 108 g (0.4565 g/ml). King Arthur's Ingredient Weight Chart lists dried breadcrumbs at 28 g per quarter cup, implying 112 g per cup or 0.4734 g/ml.

This entry covers dried plain breadcrumbs, which are what most Western recipes mean when they call for breadcrumbs without further qualification: staler white bread ground and toasted to a fine, dry crumb, then either used plain or seasoned with herbs and cheese to become what supermarkets sell as Italian breadcrumbs. The seasoned versions are typically 5 to 10 percent heavier per cup due to the added dried herbs and grated cheese, but no independent source with method attribution was found to publish them separately. Two other breadcrumb products appear on King Arthur's chart with dramatically different cup weights, and are treated as separate ingredients rather than states of this one.

Fresh breadcrumbs, made by tearing or briefly pulsing fresh soft bread rather than drying and grinding it, weigh 84 g per cup on the King Arthur chart (0.3551 g/ml). They are used in different applications than dried breadcrumbs (as a binder in meatballs and meatloaf, or as a topping that will absorb sauce during baking) and are usually made at home just before use, since they spoil in days rather than weeks. Panko, the Japanese-style breadcrumb, weighs only 50 g per cup on the King Arthur chart (0.2114 g/ml), less than half the density of Western dried breadcrumbs.

Panko is made by baking bread with an electrical current rather than in an oven, which produces a crustless loaf that is then torn (rather than ground) into large, flat, jagged flakes. The flake shape traps air both between and within particles, giving panko its characteristic crispness when fried and its low bulk density. Recipes that call for panko specifically cannot substitute Western dried breadcrumbs 1:1 by volume: one cup of panko weighs less than half of what one cup of dried breadcrumbs weighs, and the coating produced will not brown or crisp the same way.

Both panko and fresh breadcrumbs deserve their own entries, and are noted here as distinct products for completeness but not covered by this figure. Gluten-free breadcrumbs made from rice flour bread or similar have similar bulk density to standard dried breadcrumbs, typically 100 to 115 g per cup depending on the base bread, and can substitute 1:1 for coating and binding applications. No standards body publishes a bulk density for breadcrumbs.

FDA identity standards do not exist for breadcrumbs as such; they are governed by the bread standards from which the crumbs derive. Two sources only, so this entry does not meet rule 2 and is held at medium confidence until an independent third is found.