Condiments grams per cup: soy sauce, vinegar, mustard, ketchup and more compared

A US cup of a condiment weighs anywhere from about 208 grams for mayonnaise to 312 grams for hoisin sauce. What is dissolved in it decides where it lands: oil makes a sauce lighter than water, and salt and sugar make it heavier, so thin soy sauce and fish sauce weigh more than thick mustard.

All weights are for a US cup of 236.5882365 ml; a tablespoon is a sixteenth of it. 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.

A condiment fills a measuring cup the way water does, with no air between particles, so the way the cup is filled hardly matters; what changes the weight is what is dissolved or suspended in it. A cup of water weighs 236.6 grams. Salt is the densest thing in most sauces, and every 10 percent of salt adds about 7 percent to the weight of a cup; every 10 percent of sugar adds about 4 percent. Oil, lighter than water, takes weight away.

The vinegars sit next to water. White vinegar, 5 percent acetic acid, weighs 238 grams a cup, and apple cider and red wine vinegar, with a trace of fruit or wine left in them, 239 grams. Balsamic vinegar of Modena is the exception, because it is cooked grape must blended with vinegar: it weighs 255 to 270 grams a cup depending on how much must and sugar it carries, and its rules set a minimum density of 1.06 g/mL.

The salty sauces come next. Yellow mustard, 84 percent water, weighs 249 grams. Worcestershire sauce weighs 267 grams, soy sauce, about 14 percent salt, 277.6 grams, and fish sauce, about 20 percent salt, 283.9 grams, the heaviest of the thin sauces. The sweet sauces are heavier still: ketchup 272 grams, sriracha 275.6, barbecue sauce 288 and hoisin, 44 percent sugar, 312 grams, a third more than water. Mayonnaise, about four-fifths oil, weighs 208 to 226 grams, and basil pesto, oil with cheese, nuts and basil, 248.

US labels give condiments in teaspoons and tablespoons, and when they add grams many simply write the weight of water: 5 grams per teaspoon, 15 per tablespoon. For vinegar that is nearly right. For the heavier sauces it is well off. Water-weight figures rejected here include Huy Fong's 5 grams per teaspoon of sriracha, USDA's 240-gram cup of ketchup and a food table that weighs balsamic vinegar like water. USDA's cups for soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce and its 16-gram tablespoon of hoisin are rejected too, each too light or too heavy for what the sauce contains.

For the thin liquids, vinegars, soy sauce and fish sauce, a liquid measuring cup or spoon filled to the line is accurate. Thick sauces cling to the spoon, so a scraped-out tablespoon of hoisin, mustard or ketchup is often a gram or two short; weigh those straight into the bowl when the amount matters.