A pinch in cooking is a very small amount of an ingredient

Ingredient

An ingredient is a substance that forms part of a mixture . For example, in cooking, recipes specify which ingredients are used to prepare a specific dish. Many commercial products contain a secret ingredient that is purported to make them better than competing products...

, typically salt

Salt

In chemistry, salts are ionic compounds that result from the neutralization reaction of an acid and a base. They are composed of cations and anions so that the product is electrically neutral...

, sugar

Sugar

Sugar is a class of edible crystalline carbohydrates, mainly sucrose, lactose, and fructose, characterized by a sweet flavor.Sucrose in its refined form primarily comes from sugar cane and sugar beet...

 or spice

Spice

A spice is a dried seed, fruit, root, bark, or vegetative substance used in nutritionally insignificant quantities as a food additive for flavor, color, or as a preservative that kills harmful bacteria or prevents their growth. It may be used to flavour a dish or to hide other flavours...

. Traditionally it was defined as "an amount that can be taken between the thumb and forefinger". Historically the pinch was more precisely defined by some U.S. cookbooks as approximately teaspoon

Teaspoon

A teaspoon, an item of cutlery, is a small spoon, commonly part of a silverware place setting, suitable for stirring and sipping the contents of a cup of tea or coffee...

.

In the early 2000s some companies began selling measuring spoons that defined (or redefined) a dash as teaspoon, a pinch as teaspoon, and a smidgen as teaspoon. Based on these spoons, there are two pinches in a dash and two smidgens in a pinch.

One pinch of fine salt is approximately gram (20–24 pinches per teaspoon), while one pinch of sugar is – = gram.