Pumpkin Pie Spice

One US cup of pumpkin pie spice weighs 89.6 grams. Going the other way, 100 grams is about 1.12 cups.

Also called pumpkin pie spice, pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice blend, pumpkin pie spice blend, pumpkin pie seasoning.

A US cup of pumpkin pie spice weighs about 90 grams, a figure on which USDA's reference weight and an independent foodservice measurement agree within 6%, inside the 10% tolerance held for spices.

Pumpkin pie spice is a ground blend of warm baking spices, classically led by cinnamon with ginger, nutmeg, and allspice or cloves. Proportions vary by brand, but the name reliably describes the same family of blend, which is why it can be catalogued as a single ingredient. It contains no pumpkin. ExactCups treats blends like this one only when the name defines the product, and only on measurements of the blend itself, never on figures computed from its components.

USDA's SR Legacy record lists 5.6 grams per tablespoon, which scales to 89.6 grams per cup. Its teaspoon figure of 1.7 grams scales lower, to 81.6, but a 1.7 gram portion rounded to a tenth of a gram carries several percent of rounding error, so the tablespoon basis is used. A foodservice conversion table built from measurements across several vendors lists pumpkin spice at 3 ounces per cup, or 85 grams, with its tablespoon and teaspoon columns agreeing.

That same foodservice table shows why a blend cannot be treated as the average of its parts. It measures ground cinnamon at 116 grams per cup, nutmeg at 110, ground cloves at 105, allspice at 96, and ginger at 92. The blend, at 85, is lighter than every one of its components. A weighted average of those figures would overstate the blend's cup weight by 15 to 25 percent. The mechanism is not established; one plausible explanation is that mixing and sifting aerate the blend, and particles of very different shapes and sizes, from cinnamon's bark fibers to nutmeg's oily fragments, settle into a looser bed together than each does alone. Whatever the cause, the measured blend is the only defensible basis.

The blend's composition leaves a fingerprint in the USDA data. Pumpkin pie spice is about 12.6% fat, mostly saturated, with myristic acid the largest component. Myristic acid is named for nutmeg, whose fat is rich in it, so the nutmeg share of the blend accounts for much of that fat.

In practice, a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice weighs about 1.9 grams and a tablespoon 5.6 grams. Most pie and quick-bread recipes call for one to two teaspoons, where the difference between the two sources amounts to a tenth of a gram, so measuring by spoon is fine. Two cautions matter more than the figure. First, when substituting a homemade blend, mix it by weight, because each component packs differently and a volume recipe will not reproduce a commercial blend's balance. Second, pumpkin pie spice loses aroma faster than whole spices, so a jar kept from last autumn will measure the same weight but deliver noticeably less flavor. Spoon it into the measure and level without pressing, and keep the jar tightly closed.