Measurements for Baking and Cooking in Spanish

Quick Answer

Determined to crack open your Spanish-language recipe book only to find instructions that look like this?

Agrega una taza de leche condensada y una cucharadita de vainilla a la mezcla y sigue batiendo.

Don't panic. While this is a typical instruction you'd find in any libro de recetas, or recipe book, what makes cooking and baking instructions like this one so tricky is that some measurements of weight and volume are calculated differently in Spanish-language recipes while others are the same measurements used in English-language ones. In this article, we'll break down all of the measurements you'll need to know in order to turn your pastel de tres leches(tres leches cake) into a scrumptious success.

Working with Liters and Cups

If you're a baker, you know that the slightest miscalculation can ruin your culinary masterpieces. That's why understanding exactly how much a mililitro, or milliliter, is is fundamental to being able to follow a recipe in Spanish. Luckily, as with English, Spanish recipes also use teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups. Let's take a look at the translations for these measurements as well as some useful conversions.

Spanish	English	Converts to
cucharadita	teaspoon	4.9 milliliters
cucharada	tablespoon	14.7 milliliters
taza	cup	8 fluid ounces or .24 liters
mililitro	milliliter	1/1,000th of a liter or .03 fluid ounces
litro	liter	33.8 fluid ounces

Now that we have our cheat sheet at the ready, let's take a look at some examples of recipe instructions that use these measurements in context.

examples
Agrega una media taza de leche condensada y una cucharadita de vainilla a la mezcla y sigue batiendo. Add half a cup of condensed milk and one teaspoon of vanilla to the mixture and continue stirring.
Mezcla tres huevos con dos tazas de azúcar moreno con las varillas eléctricas hasta que no queden grumos. With the electric egg beater, whip three eggs with two cups of brown sugar until there are no lumps.
Pon 200 mililitros de aceite de canola en un tazón con dos tazas de agua y sal al gusto. Put 200 milliliters of canola oil in a bowl with two cups of water and salt to taste.

To Taste

How much is una pizca, or a pinch, of salt? How do you translate this immeasurable amount into Spanish? Luckily, Spanish has similar ways of instructing someone to add a slight amount of salt: use al gusto, or to taste!

Want to learn more recipe words in Spanish? Check out our article here!