You’re standing in the kitchen. Flour is everywhere. The recipe calls for 10 tablespoons of butter, but your scale is staring at you in grams.
Most people just wing it. They eyeball the wrapper or hack off a chunk and hope for the best.
Don't do that. Honestly, it's the fastest way to ruin a batch of shortbread or end up with a greasy cake. Converting 10 tablespoons of butter to grams isn't just about moving numbers around; it's about understanding how fat behaves under heat.
The short answer? 142 grams. Specifically, it is 141.75 grams if you want to be annoying about it. Most professional pastry chefs, the ones who actually know why a croissant fluffs up versus staying flat, will tell you that rounding to 142 is perfectly fine for 99% of home cooking. But there is a massive catch.
Why Weight Beats Volume Every Time
Tablespoons are a lie. Okay, maybe not a lie, but they are incredibly unreliable.
When you scoop butter into a tablespoon, you might leave air pockets. You might "heap" the spoon. Even the temperature of the butter changes how much fits into that tiny silver scoop. Cold butter is dense. Room temperature butter is pliable. Melted butter occupies space differently.
In the United States, we’re obsessed with sticks and spoons. In Europe and most of the professional culinary world, weight is king. If you use a scale to measure your 10 tablespoons of butter to grams, you ensure that your fat-to-flour ratio is identical every single time you bake.
King Arthur Baking, a company that knows more about flour than most of us know about our own relatives, consistently advocates for weighing ingredients. They’ve found that a cup of flour can vary by up to 25% depending on how you scoop it. Butter is slightly more stable because it’s a solid block, but the margin for error still exists.
The Math of the Stick
Let's break down the American stick of butter because it’s weird.
One standard stick is 8 tablespoons. It weighs 113.4 grams (usually labeled as 113g or 1/4 lb).
So, if you need 10 tablespoons, you are using one full stick plus a quarter of another stick.
113 grams (one stick) + 28 grams (two tablespoons) = 141 grams.
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Actually, to be precise, each tablespoon is 14.175 grams. Multiply that by 10 and you get 141.75.
See the problem? If you use the "eyeball" method on the wrapper, you might be off by 5 or 10 grams. In a delicate emulsion or a high-fat pastry like a pate brisee, 10 grams is the difference between "flaky" and "soggy."
Water Content: The Secret Quality Killer
Not all butter is created equal. This is the part most blog posts skip because it's complicated.
Standard American butter (like Land O'Lakes) is roughly 80% milkfat. The rest is mostly water and a tiny bit of milk solids. However, European-style butters—think Kerrygold or Plugra—are usually 82% to 84% fat.
When you convert 10 tablespoons of butter to grams, the weight stays the same (142g), but the composition of that weight changes.
If you use 142 grams of European butter in a recipe designed for American butter, you are adding more fat and less water. Your cookies might spread more. Your pie crust might be almost too tender. It’s a subtle shift, but when you’re chasing perfection, it matters.
Cook's Illustrated has done extensive testing on this. They found that while you can usually swap them, the higher fat content in European butter yields a noticeably different mouthfeel. It’s richer. It’s more "buttery," obviously. But if your recipe relies on the steam generated by the water in the butter to lift the dough, using a higher-fat butter might actually result in a shorter, denser bake.
Regional Variations and the Metric Confusion
If you are reading a recipe from the UK or Australia, a "tablespoon" might not even be the same size as an American one.
In the US, a tablespoon is 14.8 ml. In Australia, a tablespoon is often 20 ml. That is a massive discrepancy. If an Aussie recipe asks for 10 tablespoons and you use 142 grams, you are going to be way short. You’d actually need closer to 200 grams.
Always check the origin of your recipe.
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- US Tablespoon: ~14.2 grams of butter.
- Metric Tablespoon (UK/Canada): 15 grams of butter.
- Australian Tablespoon: 20 grams of butter.
For the sake of this guide, we are assuming the standard US 14.175g conversion.
Does Melted Butter Weigh Less?
People ask this constantly. "If I melt the butter, do I still use 142 grams?"
Yes.
Weight is mass. Mass doesn't change just because you turned a solid into a liquid. However, volume can change if the butter foams or if you lose moisture through evaporation during the melting process (which turns it into browned butter or ghee).
If you melt 10 tablespoons of butter in a microwave, it’s still 142 grams. If you simmer it on the stove for ten minutes until it smells like toasted hazelnuts, you’ve evaporated the water. You’ll have less than 142 grams of "stuff" left, but the fat content remains.
Practical Kitchen Application
Stop using the lines on the wrapper. They are often printed slightly off-center. Seriously, go look at a stick in your fridge right now. Sometimes the "2 tbsp" mark is a few millimeters to the left.
Instead:
- Place a small bowl on your digital scale.
- Hit the "Tare" or "Zero" button.
- Set the unit to grams.
- Cut pieces of butter into the bowl until the screen says 142.
It takes five seconds. It saves your dessert.
Why Precision Matters for Specific Recipes
Let’s look at a few examples where getting your 10 tablespoons of butter to grams exactly right is non-negotiable.
The Hollandaise Sauce: Hollandaise is an emulsion. It’s a delicate dance between egg yolks and fat. If you have too much fat (more than the 142g intended for a specific number of yolks), the sauce will break. You'll end up with a yellow puddle of grease instead of a velvety cloak for your Eggs Benedict.
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Shortbread: Shortbread is basically just butter, sugar, and flour. There’s no leavening agent like baking powder. The structure comes entirely from the way the fat coats the flour proteins. An extra 15 grams of butter because you measured poorly will turn your crisp cookies into a crumbly mess that falls apart before it hits your mouth.
Buttercream Frosting:
If you’re making a Swiss Meringue Buttercream, the temperature and the weight are everything. 142 grams of butter needs to be whisked into the egg whites at exactly the right moment. If you’ve added too much, the frosting becomes heavy and "waxy."
The Salt Factor
We haven't even talked about salt.
10 tablespoons of salted butter contains about 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt. If you are converting to grams for a recipe that specifies unsalted butter, you need to adjust your added salt.
Most pros use unsalted butter specifically so they can control the sodium. If you only have salted butter, use your 142 grams but cut back the salt in the rest of the recipe by about 1/4 teaspoon per stick.
Summary of Conversions
To keep it simple, here is how the numbers shake out for 10 tablespoons:
- Total Grams: 141.75g (Round to 142g).
- Total Ounces: 5 oz.
- Sticks: 1.25 sticks.
- Cups: 0.625 cups (or 5/8 of a cup).
Actionable Next Steps
If you want to stop guessing and start baking like a professional, do these three things immediately.
First, buy a digital scale that measures in 0.1-gram increments. They cost twenty bucks and will change your life.
Second, the next time you see "tablespoons" in a baking recipe, look up the weight conversion first. Don't even reach for the measuring spoons.
Third, pay attention to the butter type. If you’re using a high-fat grass-fed butter, remember that you’re adding more fat and less water to the bowl. If a dough feels too soft, chill it for 30 minutes before working with it.
Precision isn't about being a perfectionist; it's about consistency. When you know exactly what 142 grams looks like, you can troubleshoot why a recipe failed—or more importantly, why it succeeded.
Stop measuring by volume. Start measuring by weight. Your oven will thank you.