Actually in the US they are still done by volume most of the time unless you're a fanatic or a foodie. All the recipes I've ever read uses use cups and teaspoons.
Weight helps for consistency, but it’s also much easier: you just put the bowl or pot on the and toss stuff in. Fewer measuring cups to clean, and you don’t have to wonder how much of the honey (etc) actually made it into the bowl.
You can even retare the scale between ingredients if you don’t want to do mental math.
Yeah. Measuring by volume is a nightmare. 3tbsp of unmelted butter? How am I supposed to measure that? 3tbsp of melted butter? So I just have to guess and then melt too much? A cup of brown sugar? Is it packed? To what extent? And now I have to clean that cup because I need it again for flour?
I've never seen butter in a tub before. We get weird "spreadable" vegetable-based butter substitutes in tubs. Some British people call it margarine but that's incorrect as margarine comes in solid blocks like butter (it's uncommon these days as it's no longer really needed).
In the US we have "whipped butter" which (according to Wikipedia) is made spreadable by aerating it with nitrogen. I recall hearing that it isn't suitable for situations that require measuring because the volume is not the same. (But it does works well on bread or for greasing a pan.)
Precisely: this is why foodies and fanatics in the US, in spite of the dominant cultural preference for volumetric measure, prefer - like most of the rest of the world - to measure food by weight, this being a great example of how volumetric measurement can be misleading.
It depends. A normal recipe may say: 4 large eggs, where large is actually a regulated weight range. A baked recipe where the ratios are more important may ask you to weigh your eggs, then use that weight for the flour and sugar. Or... it may just say 4 eggs where it doesn’t really matter.
Most recipes are useless internationally anyway, the ingredients are often different locally or hard to source. If you're lucky and you have a kitchen in two different regions or, like me, you live in a non-English speaking country who still wants to cook dishes from home then it's going to affect you. That's a vanishingly small number of people.
Otherwise, most people will know how much an egg weighs, especially if they bake regularly.
Yes, this is a point that is usually neglected. People search for recipes online and assume they will all work. The flour is very different across the world. You can easily get Indian flours in the UK, but it's quite hard to find French and impossible to find American (it is considered not fit for human consumption due to the bleaching process).
Bleach is not generally considered OK to eat. The flour is naturally whitened by ageing and there are naturally softer flours so no need to chemically alter them.
No different than US volume measure where you actually need to have the "measuring cups". Weight is still easier, as you can refer to the reference range of 'large' and reproduce it on a scale.
Eggs are usually uniform enough to not matter. The one exception is macarons, where you measure egg whites by precise weight. But perfect macarons are incredibly finicky.
Eggs are just... eggs, no matter how you write down your recipe. If you made a great cake and wanted to repeat the process, and it had three eggs in it, you'd... write down that you used three eggs. It's not really relevant to how you describe the quantities of the other ingredients you use.
But if you used 220g of flour, you're more likely to recreate the cake accurately next time if you write that down, than if you write down '1 3/4 cups flour'.
But, like, I buy them in boxes, labeled 'Large', and... they're all pretty much the same, week after week. So... sure, I can get different sized eggs. But if I want to buy a lot of same sized eggs to cook with, I can do that.
No, and this is a great reminder that any home cook who claims they cook by weight for precision and repeatability is full of it. It turns out that not all eggs are the same, not all flour had the same moisture, not all butter has the same amount of flavor, not all kitchens are at the same temperature.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen someone in a video boast about measuring the flour by weight for their bread, only to add a completely unmeasured amount when flouring the working surface or their hands.
And there’s a reason most recipes use values that are straight conversions from volume rounded to a whole number. There’s a reason nobody says “the real trick to this recipe is the extra 10 grams of sugar”. Indeed, food preferences are largely based on our upbringings, so it’s no surprise that American tastes are built on recipes that can be measured in cups, tablespoons, etc.
Frankly, garbage. Serious bakers are capable of a lot more consistency than you realize.
> It turns out that not all eggs are the same.
You can weigh eggs, or more often it's actually sufficient to balance the liquid to offset the variation in eggs -- a lot of baking especially isn't just about taste - but about consistency and proper proportions to get repeatable texture and density. It is also generally speaking quite sufficient to deal with food liquids in volume as well since room temperature differences are controlled close enough such that it doesn't matter.
The difference in weight of a cup of water between 20 C and 25 C is negligible.
1 cup of flour on the other hand can vary in actual material by over 20% because of numerous variables from clumping to type of flour.
> I don’t know how many times I’ve seen someone in a video boast about measuring the flour by weight for their bread, only to add a completely unmeasured amount when flouring the working surface or their hands.
Basically bullshit again because: In most cases, the working surface flour won't amount to even 1% of the final product, however as stated volume vs. weight can make double-digit differences.
Your whole "10 gram" of sugar claim is a straw-man.
Baking and pastries tends to require a lot more precision then basic cooking to get repeatable edible results. It's the one reason why pre-made cake mixes and Bisquik are so popular, even with professional chefs.
Eggs are consistent enough that they generally contain the same amounts of the relevant chemicals as another, similar sized egg. As a result, you don't generally need to weigh or measure the volume of your egg to achieve consistency, so long as your eggs are consistent. But you do need to use approximately the proportionately correct amounts of the other chemicals in your recipe.
And you're just making your life easier if you measure those quantities in terms of mass, because it has all sorts of benefits:
1) You don't need to worry about packing - the same mass of table salt and coarse salt, sifted flour and packed flour, confectioners' sugar and granulated sugar; all will have the same amount of the active substance (but the form factor may of course have other effects on your recipe)
2) you can use a fine grained scale like grams, without having to introduce cumulative error (imagine if you tried to measure out 7/8 cup of flour by measuring 42 teaspoons - your error would be huge)
3) you can add it up across combinations of ingredients (100g of flour + 100g of milk weighs 200g; 1 cup of flour + 1 cup of milk has... who knows how much volume? That was, after all, the point of the original article at the top of this thread). This has huge benefits when adding mixed dry ingredients like mixtures of types of flour and cocoa, or mixed dried fruits, where you need to have a reasonably fixed total mass, but the ratios aren't as important. Just keep adding until you have the right total mass - something you can't do with volume.
Measuring volumes is harder, less effective, and more error prone. That would all be the case even if you used a sensible volume measure like milliliters, but it's even worse if you insist on using a volume measure system made of arbitrarily named units like tablespoons and cups where you have to memorize a dozen conversion factors and work in fractions the whole time.
The vast majority of cooking is done by sight, feel, smell and taste. The key to repeatability is to adjust based on experience. 'Hmm, this doesn't taste right, i think it needs a little more vinegar/sugar/whatever to bring it together'. That's the art in cooking.
Now there is science as well, and this tends to come into play with techniques and ingredients which change considerably when cooked, so things like baking, or bread making (there are lots of examples, but these are a good place to start). You'll find plenty of cooks who say they can't make great cakes, and generally it's because they aren't good at measuring. Bread making is a little bit of both. With the starting point you do tend to adjust as you go along. After a first rise when you knock the bread back you get a feel for how the dough is behaving, and add a little more flour (typically) to bring things under control. Yeast is a live ingredient so you get batch to batch variations you need to correct for.
I'm not convinced by your argument about America and cups - you'll not find that in American restaurants, and I can't remember Americans complaining about how restaurant food 'just doesn't taste right' or something like that!
You don’t have to be a fanatic, you just have to care about getting a consistent result. A cup of dry flour can vary in weight by more than 20%, depending on how you scoop it, the humidity, etc. That’s such a large variance that you would see the difference in the result. Bake a cake with 20% more flour than you should and it’s going to be dry.
When flour gets wet, it sticks together to form dough. Dough can have large air pockets in it. Dry flour with a bit of humidity can also form these air pockets, albeit typically on a much smaller scale.
Whether you pack flour down or sift it through a sieve into your measuring cup can make a huge difference in the weight.
We use various spoons here in the UK in cooking but not cups (tea spoon, dessert spoon, table spoon). I think it's 2 tea spoons to a dessert spoon, 3 to a table spoon.
These tend to get used for liquids (so you tend to see 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract, or something like that).
For solids there's still a fair amount of recipes floating about with oz rather than grams but these tend to be the ones handed down from the 70s!
There's a difference between accuracy and precision, and there's also a difference between consistency and convenience.
It's the reason I might choose Ruby over C (convenience - Ruby was designed to be centred around the human, like many Imperial measures, and non-decimal currency btw), or use feet instead of metres (because I have feet that are, astonishingly, close to a foot long) or any other number of examples where metric is not the best or a better choice.
I'll leave you to divide 100 by 3 or 12 so I can buy 1 or 4 of those dozen eggs you're selling with £1 while this Victorian street urchin who's had little to no schooling beats you at it because they're using a non-decimal currency with more factors…
tl;dr People in the past weren't stupid, they just had less access to the technology required to maintain a metric or decimal system in a widespread number of contexts. The existence of such technology does not obviate their usefulness.
Your Michelin starred restaurants are doing alright compared to which country? Many countries are doing better than the US there, both per capita and even absolute.
It explicitly means that dividing by anything other than a power of 2 is hard. One third of a quart is... quick, how many cups? Okay, now what's that in ounces?
And that's just dividing by three, which is a pretty normal thing to want your measure system to handle.
Base 10 measures are directly compatible with the number system. Even though metric doesn't admit factors other than 2 and 5, because it's decimal I can still confidently and quickly tell you that 1/3 of a liter is 333ml. Or that 1/7 of a liter is 142ml - and if I want to check that I can just type 1000/7 into a calculator and read off the result. How many ounces in 1/7 of a quart?
How do you expect to use a calculator with dough on your hands?
> How many ounces in 1/7 of a quart?
Why are you trying to divide volumetric measures by weight? You need to measure the liquid's weight and divide that by 7. Liquids differ in weight per unit volume.
:-) There are volumetric and weight-based ozs. There are 128 ozs in a gallon. That is 16 cups to a gallon with 8 ozs per cup.
The problems that the poster one-higher stated are trivial. 128/3 = 42 2/3 ozs. 1/7 of a gallon in ozs is 8/7 * 16 in ozs = just over 18 ozs. 1/7 of a quart is just that answer divided by 4, 4.6 as an off the cuff calculation.
That's a good point, the good old fluid ounce or "floz" as I would read it as a child. I did used to wonder who Floz was and what she'd done to deserve having her name in so many recipe books :)
That's funny! I just did an image search to see if anyone had ever drawn a picture of her. The first three images on google for floz were a shot glass measuring out 2 ozs of bourbon, Cetaphil, and a container of clear edible glue!
You seem to be hung up on converting between place values. When you say, quick, how many cups in a pint" it's like asking "quick, how many grams in a kilogram!" You'd look at the person funny.
It's only self evident because you know the answer. How is knowing kilo = 1000 that much different than pint = 2 cups = 16 oz? They're just powers of 2 instead of 10.
Because a kilogram is still just "grams"; the relation between kilo-, milli-, etc. is linear. Metric units allow you translate, for example, 1 liter to milliliters in just one jump. And it's not like there are that many prefixes to remember.
The relationship isn't linear, it's logerithmic, just as the us volumetric measures are.
There are more steps in the power-of-two measures, but hardly anything unreasonable.
The real usability of the metric system, which I think you're getting at is that those prefixes are reüsable between all units, whereas in the us customary system it's no holds barred and everything outside the volumetric is arbitrary.
That said, with length, it is nice having units that break apart evenly at 2, 3, 4, and 6; but I don't think that's quite enough to redeem it.
It doesn't matter, since the material is singular and specified. A cup of flour (typical in the US) or 120g flour (everywhere else) is the same amount of flour.
edit: It's the case that in the US recipes are commonly specified by volume, with default packing conditions assumed or specified. Here's the top hit for 'cake recipe' on Google for me, where every ingredient but eggs is specified in volume:
edit 2: There are multiple assumptions baked into conventional references. A cup of flour does not mean a cup of sifted flour unless it says so. Similarly, 120g of flour means under one Earth gravity at sea level and not on the surface of a neutron star unless it says so.
I bake with whole meal, high grade, tipo 00, zentrofan flour and straight gluten flour. If I do it by volume it gets all messed up. Zentrofan and gluten are very fine and seem to pack down much tighter.
And yet recipes are usually specified in volume in the US. This means packing properties are assumed to be in some default range so that can be neglected:
I use volumetric measures for dry goods all the time. I'm not saying it doesn't work, I'm just saying that it's not as precise as a weight would be. Whether or not that matters is a different story. I would say "not really".
You could. Many or most places do that. But US recipes typically don't, and work out fine. So I guess volumetric measurements that assume default packing conditions often work out OK in practice, though @lostlogin above reports a corner case that doesn't work.
Most people don't sift out the chaff or rocks today, but sifting performs important functions of making flour lighter for certain "light & airy" recipes that cannot be properly performed only by weighing.
Your prior point was that you don't need to sift flour but only weigh it. That is false, as sifting flour changes the properties of the final baked product. You now changed that to, in essence, say that weighing tells you the weight of flour. Yes, weighing tells you the weight of what is being weighed.
In this case, the forms of the statement are identical. "One cup of sifted flour" is semantically identical with "sift one cup of flour."
The difference is the method of measurement, whether by volume or by weight. Then, it is important to either understand the rules of recipe specification, especially with baking, or to have the recipe specify as to whether there are implicit steps.
