Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
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We can’t measure in feet or inches because it would be ambiguous about how wide to make it
As evidence I would like to enter the subway foot-long controversy
Elaphant’s foot pizza should be a thing!
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Adam ragusea has some good video explaining both why we use volume and why we don’t use metric
https://youtu.be/iJymKowx8cY?si=ZJ7sKhOdiHxozSUO
Another video that explains stuff on the imperial system that fits.
To anyone who tries watching the first one, just skip ahead to 6:50 where he actually starts explaining his reasoning. I can summarizer them here
- “Volume is visible”
- “You gotta scoop your stuff out with something, so it might as well be by something that measures volume”
The third one was too dumb for me to follow. Something about if you measure stuff by weight, you end up with large portions.
The fourth one was just absurd. No one measures spices by weight… So not being able to measure 1.2g of cinnamon or what not, just isn’t a thing.
Alright. I’ll stop there. The arguments presented go from fairly bad, to dumb, to made up stuff no one does. The arguments against them are so easy to express:
- “Amounts” of cooking ingredients is mass, so if you want to measure that, you… might as well just measure that, ie weight.
- Amounts that make sense to measure by weight, you measure by weight.
- Spices, and stuff that makes sense to measure by volume, you measure by teaspoon, pinches, or what not. Rarely is the accuracy there all that important, tbh.
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This is what they use. Still a horrible way to measure things.
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Cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons in this context are standardized units of measure. It is very common to find at least one set of measuring cups and spoons in a US kitchen. Scales are uncommon.
I use both. For flour, scales are far, far superior. For sugar, it does not really seem to matter. For small amounts, I suspect my tea/tablespoons might be more accurate than my scale…
Not that accuracy matters that much in a recipe using eggs. Chickens aren’t necessarily known for precision…
Off topic:
I have learned that hens were laying eggs, chicken were the offspring.
Is this a british-american thing or just a common mistake?
Chicks are baby chickens. All hens and roosters are chickens. Does that answer your question?
So why are young women called chicks, even if they’re grown up?
Because slang doesn’t follow rules
History.
Why do Brits use Stone for weight of people? Same answer.
Not quite the same as Stones and Kilogrammes are both units of weight. Using cups is like weighing somebody using those luggage size baskets in the airport.
Because you can’t pack a scale and weights on a cart as easily as you can a set of cups?
Why are you using weights?
Digi’s are like ten bucks
They are now. Not when people were going out west on wagons. As stated above, it’s because of historical reasons.
Most baking doesn’t require the precision of weighing. They are rough proportions, not an exact science.
An experienced baker, or really any kind of chef, will learn over time to make minor adjustments based on a lot of stuff. Maybe a bit less sugar, to taste. Maybe a difference in the brand or exact type of ingredient compared to what you’re used to. Maybe it’s a particularly dry day and you need to add more moisture to the dough.
If it’s something I have a lot of experience with I don’t even bother with measuring at all, just eyeball it.
I do this, and my brother who is an amateur chef thinks it’s witchcraft. Baking is not hard to eyeball or make by feel people.
I do this, and my brother who is an amateur chef thinks it’s witchcraft. Baking is not hard to eyeball or make by feel people.
I can do this no problem however my WIFE cannot. If something doesn’t have a recipe defined down to a gnats ass then she looses confidence and nearly always screws it up. She’s not dumb she just doesn’t have the knack. It’s sorta like a “green thumb”, some people will kill a plant just looking at it while others are seemingly able to grow palm trees in the Arctic.
I’m sure it’s trainable but some people just have the ability and others don’t. Different people / different gifts and all that.
As someone who once subbed cayenne 1:1 for black pepper in spaghetti sauce, and who has learned to make my own breadcrumbs from failed sourdough, I promise it’s a learned skill. It just takes letting yourself fail a lot and not taking yourself too seriously.
I’m a trained chef working the trade for 30 years. 2 years in vocational school, a year for cooking and a year for bakery/patisserie. I’m a really confident cook - the concept of different cuisines, the basic ingredients and seasonings, no probs. Baking is still a rocket science for me. My current head chef said baking is fun if you know what you are doing but I’m still after 30 years not fully confident about the consistency.
I’ve heard that several times from different people… That chefs often don’t like baking. Or are at least sceptical about their abilities (or the process.)
I think it comes down to the fact that cooking is active. You constantly season, add heat, remove heat, and check if it’s done. Baking is more passive, you mix things and hope for the best, you can’t just add more sugar or flour at the 10 minute mark.
My advice to anyone is start with pancakes. Make a few different recipes and pay attention to the differences. Then make them without a recipe. Switch up ingredients, sub in whatever you feel like, play with ratios. Once you have a handle on that, move to sourdough, cookies, or piecrust. Then do muffins. Leave cakes for last, because they are the most finicky. You’ll be baking with confidence and without a recipe in no time.
Some good answers here, thanks everyone, I’ve learnt some stuff today. 🙂
Thanks for actually being interested in the discussion.
Eh, it’s what I grew up with…
3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon (14.787ml)
1 tablespoon = .5 ounces
8 ounces = 1 cup (236.588ml)
1 cup = .5 pints
1 pint = .5 quarts (473.176ml)
1 quart = .25 gallonsThe weird thing is, above 20 ounces, sodas are sold in metric. 1L, 2L, 3L. So is alcohol, 750ml.
Milk and juice are sold in ounces, pints, quarts and gallons.
I’m always confused by their insistence to use fluid ounces.
An ounce is fine it’s a measurement of mass. But how can you measure liquids by mass, when really what you mean is displacement, its like saying fluid kilograms, it’s not a thing, it makes no sense.
I know Americans probably know what it means but everybody else doesn’t have a clue. If you have 250 fluid oz of something is that like a bucket or a single droplet? Or is it a small booting lake, I have no idea at all.
Fl. Oz are actually nothing to do with weight. They are volume.
For each fluid oz. use 30 ml
It’s only approximate but the official measurements for nutrition actually do it in the US so it’s not a real unit anyway anymore.
Fl. Oz are actually nothing to do with weight. They are volume.
Well yes, but also no. It is a unit of volume, but it comes from the volume that an ounce of fluid (specifically water) uses. Not at all unlike a gram being based on a cubic centimeter of water, which we also call a milliliter. Imperial just makes that a little more transparent, which also makes things a little more confusing.
The metric system uses a similar principle. 1 liter is a kg of water. It’s just named better.
Hehe, not to offend anyone but I think Americans just like crazy units that are either cumbersome, difficult to convert or in this case imprecise as most ingredients vary in density, depending on which flour you chose and how you put it into the cup.
My guess is unwillingness to improve anything and an inability to learn for a subset of people.
I mean weighing things used to be more difficult and required you to move these weights around and was more complicated than just taking a cup of something. But nowadays we have electronic kitchen scales for 10€. And they don’t require you to have a set of cups, spoons and get everything messy with butter.
I think the whole baking is quite different and convenience products like pre-made and refrigerated cookie dough or self-raising flour are far more prevalent than where I live. But we also buy lots of pre-made pizza dough and cake mixes here so there is that.
I’ve been cooking a lot lately. I don’t measure anything. I eyeball my most stuff anyway. If I understand the recipe, then I know how much is needed. It takes practice, but it’s much easier than weighing or using measuring cups.
Do you really believe that the people who wrote the recipe measured everything to perfection while keeping score of the exact amounts and timing through trial and error? No, they didn’t. They made something and then estimated roughly how much they used when writing the recipe afterwards.
The initial recipe that would be true.
But then they use the recipe card and make the dish and realize “oops need more of that” Then they update the card and make sure the recipe is correct.
Tradition, and its dumb as hell since we have set the official definition of every “imperial measure” to metric we just keep using the silly ones.
Shutout to the one dude who downvoted literally every comment lol I hope you enjoyed it
weren’t many digital scales out on the prairie when the settlers were looking to make bread
Bah!
Bread is a non measurement baking thing.
It’s more of an art than a science, unlike the rest of fucking baking.
Cooking is supposed to be innovative and spontaneous, not measured down to the last gram!
I may have very strong feelings about baking and its precision needed, except for actual cooking time, that shit is the most important but it’s up in the air, so just keep opening the oven to check it.
I really really hate fucking baking.
