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I need to purchase 1.5 cups of hazelnuts for a recipe I want to make but they’re sold by weight not volume. Approximately how much does a cup of them weigh? I would prefer to purchase as close to what I need as possible since I don’t really have a use for the left overs.

Update

The nuts are sold whole, but my recipe calls for them chopped.

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    Does your recipe say "1.5 cups of hazelnuts, chopped" or "1.5 cups of chopped hazelnuts"? In the first case, you measure them whole and chop them afterwards, in the second case, you measure them after the chopping. This results in very different amounts of hazelnuts.
    – rumtscho ♦
    May 1, 2012 at 9:19
  • @rumtscho It doesn't clearly say but I'm assuming they want 1.5 cups whole. This is the recipe dvour.com/recipes/gianduja-gelato
    – Brian Surowiec
    May 1, 2012 at 17:40
  • "my recipe calls for them chopped" is misleading to a cook. If the ingredient list says "1.5 cups hazelnuts", then the recipe "calls for" whole hazelnuts. The fact that you chop them as part of the recipe is something different. You measure what is given in the ingredients list, in this case whole hazelnuts. There are converters online, but you can also look at gianduja ratios from known good recipes.
    – rumtscho ♦
    May 1, 2012 at 18:36
  • @Brian Surowiec: The recipe starts with whole hazelnuts and chops them in step 1. Step 4 discards the hazelnuts -- they were there just to infuse their flavor. This leads me to believe that the measurements on this ingredient will be very forgiving.
    – Steven Rumbalski
    May 1, 2012 at 20:35

2 Answers 2

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Well 1.5 cups is volumetric so the weight will depend on how tightly packed that cup is, if they are chopped, etc. On average though, 1.5 cups of chopped hazelnuts is about 6.08 oz (172 g) according to the USDA's averages. You can check the USDA's National Nutrient Database page for hazelnuts if you want to see estimated weights for 1.5 cups of whole, chopped, or ground hazelnuts.

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    There's something screwy with those numbers: it estimates 1.5 cups of whole nuts as almost twice the weight of the same quantity of ground nuts. This is totally backwards. I can't come up with an interpretation under which their numbers make sense; chopping and grinding nuts doesn't change their weight, so if they measured before chopping/grinding, then all the weights should be the same, and if they measured after chopping/grinding, then the whole nuts should weigh the least.
    – Marti
    May 1, 2012 at 14:39
  • I think Marti may have found the Higgs Boson!
    – Chris Cudmore
    May 1, 2012 at 14:42
  • The recipe (dvour.com/recipes/gianduja-gelato) indicates that they are whole, not chopped.
    – Steven Rumbalski
    May 2, 2012 at 21:31
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The first place you can look at when you have such a question is a cooking converter. There are several such online, I use mostly the one at http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/cooking, but I don't know if it is better or worse than the competition. By the way, it lists 1.5 cups of whole hazelnuts as 255 grams.

Another thing you can do is to find the correct ratio from a known good recipe (the best sources will list ingredients by weight) and use that one. I was going to look for a gianduja ratio for you when I took a better look at your recipe.

While it calls your ice cream gianduja ice cream, it does not contain or use gianduja. Gianduja is two things - either a paste made from hazelnuts and powdered sugar (analog to raw marzipan), or this paste mixed with cooking chocolate or pure cocoa butter. Your recipe uses milk infused with hazelnut, which is a different thing entirely. I suspect that the exact ratio is not too important for such an infusion, but if you want to know an optimal infusion ratio, look for other recipes which use a nut-milk infusion but are better quality, use them to prepare the infusion, then continue with your recipe as it is.

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  • That converter does the same thing: it thinks a cup of ground almonds weighs less than a cup of whole almonds. What the *#$@!%# is going on?
    – Marti
    May 1, 2012 at 18:52
  • @marti I suspect that many of these converters don't have a database with thousands of foods but are just a beautiful frontend for the freely-available USDA data. I have had OK results using them, probably the error is a typo somewhere which got propagated.
    – rumtscho ♦
    May 1, 2012 at 20:03

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