Baking chips in grams: chocolate, white, butterscotch and peanut butter chips, toffee bits and sprinkles compared

A US cup of baking chips weighs about 170 grams, whether the chips are semisweet, white, butterscotch or peanut butter. Chips are small drops of sugar and fat of much the same size and shape, and the same shape packs the same way, so the cup holds the same weight within a few percent.

All weights are for a US cup of 236.5882365 ml; a tablespoon is a sixteenth of it and a teaspoon a forty-eighth. The scale puts every figure on one axis of grams per cup. A range means the sources disagree by more than this site’s tolerance for that kind of ingredient, so no single figure is chosen. King Arthur’s figure is shown where this site records one, with the verdict on it. Each ingredient’s own page has every source and the full reasoning.

Chips are small teardrops of sugar and fat with cocoa solids, milk or flavouring, a solid of about 1.3 grams per millilitre. Drops like these touch only at their sides and fill a little over half of a measuring cup, which puts a level cup at 0.70 to 0.75 grams per millilitre, 165 to 177 grams. USDA weighs a cup of semisweet chips at 168 grams, white chips at 170, butterscotch chips at 170 and peanut butter chips at 168, and America's Test Kitchen and King Arthur Baking give 6 ounces, 170 grams, for the chips they list.

Smaller and larger pieces move the figure a little. Mini chips nest into each other's gaps and weigh 173 grams a cup by USDA's measure, 177 by King Arthur's. Chunks are larger and irregular, and how their flat faces happen to fall in the cup varies more: their sources span 170 to 182 grams.

Bag statements are rounder than they look. An 11 ounce bag of butterscotch chips is 1 2/3 cups in Nestlé's recipe and 1 3/4 cups on Hershey's bag; a 10 ounce bag of Reese's peanut butter chips is 1 2/3 cups. At 170 grams a cup an 11 ounce bag holds 1.83 cups and a 10 ounce bag 1.67, so the makers are rounding to the nearest fraction a cook can measure. The nutrition labels say 15 grams a tablespoon, which is the FDA's reference weight for baking candies rather than a weighed spoonful; a cup at that rate would be 240 grams.

Toffee bits and sprinkles sit on either side. Toffee bits are broken, irregular shards of brittle candy that do not settle evenly, and their sources run from 142 to 170 grams a cup. Rainbow sprinkles are almost all sugar, a denser solid than chocolate, in tiny rods: their labels weigh a teaspoon at 4 grams, 192 grams a cup, because the FDA's reference amount for decorations is a teaspoon.

For cookies and bars, one kind of chip can replace another cup for cup: the weight barely changes. When a recipe gives a bag rather than cups, use the bag it was tested with, and when it gives grams, weigh, since a heaped cup of chips holds noticeably more than a level one.