Ground Nutmeg

One US cup of ground nutmeg weighs 112 grams. Going the other way, 100 grams is about 0.89 cups.

Also called nutmeg, nutmeg powder, powdered nutmeg, nutmeg spice, ground nutmeg powder, muscade.

TL;DR: **One US cup of ground nutmeg weighs about 112 g (7 g per tablespoon, 2.3 g per teaspoon).** USDA FoodData Central and every downstream reference converge on this figure within a 7% spread. King Arthur does not publish a weight for nutmeg in their Ingredient Weight Chart, though they do sell the ground product, leaving ExactCups' figure the closest thing to a definitive baker's reference.

Ground nutmeg is the seed of the evergreen tree *Myristica fragrans*, native to the Banda Islands of Indonesia and now cultivated across Sri Lanka, Grenada, and India. The whole seed is dried inside its lacy red aril — that aril, dried and ground separately, is the spice mace. Mace and nutmeg come from the same fruit but differ in oil profile, colour, and density; they are not one-to-one weight substitutes even though they share flavour compounds. This entry covers the seed only.

The density convergence is unusually clean for a spice. USDA FDC 171326 lists 7 g per tablespoon, which extrapolates directly to 112 g per US cup. Aqua-calc, which references USDA, reports the same 112 g/cup (and 118 g per metric cup, the same physical density expressed against Europe's 250 mL cup). Pantrymath's independent ingredient reference lands on 112 g/cup and 7 g/tbsp as well. The one meaningful outlier is Chefs-Resources' professional kitchen chart at 0.40 teaspoons per gram, which extrapolates to 120 g/cup — slightly heavier due to standard-jar particle size and settling in commercial kitchens. That is a 7% spread from the USDA anchor to the kitchen upper bound, well under ExactCups' 10% milled tolerance.

One caveat is worth stating clearly. USDA's own teaspoon portion is listed as 2.2 g, which back-extrapolates to only 105.6 g/cup — a 6% understatement of USDA's own tablespoon figure. This is a rounding artifact: USDA rounds low-weight tsp portions to one decimal place, and the tablespoon value (7 g) is the physical density figure that density-conversion sites reference. When adapting a recipe by weight, 2.3 g per teaspoon is closer to physical reality than the rounded 2.2 g.

Ground nutmeg is oily — roughly 36% fat by weight, one of the fattiest common spices — which explains both its density and its clumping behaviour. The essential oil (5-15% by weight) and the fixed oil (called nutmeg butter) coat particles and cause them to settle tighter than dry, fibrous spices like ground ginger (about 96 g/cup) or the waxy denseness of ground turmeric (144 g/cup). This oil content is also why ground nutmeg loses potency far faster than whole nutmeg: the volatile aromatics evaporate through the powder's surface area within months of grinding. Bakers who grate whole nutmeg fresh get a fluffier product that measures 5-10% lighter per cup and delivers dramatically more flavour per gram — the reason serious pastry kitchens buy whole nutmegs and a Microplane rather than pre-ground jars.

Practical baker recommendation: weigh at 7 g per tablespoon or 2.3 g per teaspoon. For freshly grated whole nutmeg, use the same weight target but expect one Microplane pass to yield roughly a rounded quarter-teaspoon of shavings. When adapting older recipes that specify "1/4 nutmeg, grated" — a common 19th-century notation — a whole nutmeg weighs about 5-8 g, so a quarter is 1-2 g, roughly a level half-teaspoon of the pre-ground product.