Teaspoons to Milliliters

Teaspoons measure the ingredients that do the most work per gram: baking soda, baking powder, salt, yeast, extracts and spices. An extra half teaspoon of baking soda can make a cake taste soapy, so these are the measurements where converting carefully pays off. A level US teaspoon of table salt weighs about 6 g, of baking soda about 5 g and of ground cinnamon roughly 2.6 g.

The US teaspoon of 4.93 mL and the metric 5 mL spoon differ by about 1.4%, which is far smaller than the variation from leveling or heaping. In practice, a measuring spoon labeled 5 mL can be used for any modern recipe.

Pharmacies once dosed syrups by the teaspoon, and many people still think of a dose as one teaspoon. The pharmaceutical teaspoon is defined as exactly 5 mL, and drug labels in the US and most other countries now state doses in mL to avoid errors. Cutlery teaspoons range from roughly 2.5 to 7 mL, so a dose poured into a table spoon can be off by a wide margin.

Use the oral syringe or dosing cup supplied with the medicine. If a label says one teaspoon, read it as 5 mL.

Measuring sets usually include 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 tsp, which are 0.62, 1.23, 2.46 and 4.93 mL in US terms. When you scale a recipe up, convert to milliliters first, multiply, and then return to spoons: 9 teaspoons is 44 mL, better measured as 3 tablespoons.

Three teaspoons make a US tablespoon, and the tablespoons to milliliters page covers that size. Every kitchen and metric volume is in the unit converter.