Salt Conversion Calculator

Same salt, different volume — here's why

Sodium chloride is sodium chloride: a gram of fine table salt delivers exactly the same amount of salty flavor as a gram of Morton kosher salt or a gram of Diamond Crystal kosher salt. What changes between them is entirely physical, not chemical — it's how each salt's individual crystals are shaped, and how much empty air ends up between them when you scoop a spoonful. Table salt is ground into small, dense, roughly cubic crystals that pack tightly with very little air between them. Morton kosher salt uses a flatter, flake-like crystal that leaves more air gaps. Diamond Crystal kosher salt goes further still: its crystals are formed as hollow, pyramid-shaped flakes through a different production process, so a cup or teaspoon of it is mostly air by volume compared to table salt.

That's why the same teaspoon measurement can hold such different weights: about 6 grams for table salt, about 5 grams for Morton kosher, and only about 3 grams for Diamond Crystal — roughly half the salt of table salt in the same volume. If a recipe says "1 tsp kosher salt" without specifying a brand and you use Diamond Crystal when the recipe was developed with Morton (or vice versa), you can end up 40-50% off on actual salt content, which is a meaningfully different level of seasoning. This is a well-known enough issue that serious recipe developers (including Diamond Crystal and Morton themselves) publish brand-specific conversion guidance rather than treating "kosher salt" as one interchangeable ingredient.

Diamond Crystal's cup weight is the one figure on this page we can't pin down precisely: published reference sources disagree with each other from about 135g to 150g per cup, likely because its hollow, flaky crystals compress unpredictably depending on how firmly they're packed into the cup. Rather than presenting a single false-precision number, this page shows that as a range and strongly recommends weighing Diamond Crystal on a scale instead of measuring it by cup whenever a recipe's salt content actually matters (bread doughs, brines, and precisely seasoned dishes especially).

The calculator above intentionally works in teaspoons, tablespoons and grams rather than cups, since the teaspoon-level weight figures are consistent enough to convert reliably — the cup-level uncertainty specifically affects volume measurements at that larger scale, so it's kept separate as a reference figure rather than folded into the live calculator.

Frequently asked questions

Is table salt saltier than kosher salt?

No — 1 gram of table salt is exactly as salty as 1 gram of any kosher salt, because salt's saltiness depends only on weight, not on brand or crystal shape. What differs is how much a teaspoon or cup holds: table salt's fine, dense crystals pack far more sodium chloride into the same volume than kosher salt's larger, airier flakes, which is why swapping cup-for-cup or teaspoon-for-teaspoon between them can badly over- or under-salt a dish.

Why is Diamond Crystal kosher salt's weight per cup so uncertain?

Diamond Crystal's crystals are hollow, pyramid-shaped flakes formed by an unusual production process, and how they settle and compress in a measuring cup varies more than denser salts. Published figures for its weight per cup range from about 135g to 150g depending on the source, which is why this page shows a range for cup measurements instead of a single precise number, and recommends weighing it whenever you can.

Should I convert salt by weight or by volume?

By weight whenever you have a kitchen scale — it's exact, because 1 gram of any salt is equally salty regardless of type. Converting by volume (teaspoons or cups) is only an approximation based on typical crystal density, and it's the volume conversion that varies most between salt brands, especially for Diamond Crystal kosher salt.