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I really hope that the book uses metric units. I recently read "The Science of Good Cooking", which was interesting but unfortunately used US units throughout,

I really hope that the book uses metric units. I recently read "The Science of Good Cooking", which was interesting but unfortunately used US units throughout, which makes it quite unscientific in my opinion. "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee is another great book about the chemistry of cooking, and I especially like it since it doesn't try hard to be hip or cool as opposed to some other books about cooking chemistry I could name.

jghn 11y ago
I don't have it in front of me but he typically gives us volume and also grams for measurement. That said I fail to see why semantic sugar like units would really skew your opinion here, at the end of the day his book is aimed at a home cook. It's not modernist cuisine
- ThePhysicist 11y ago
  Yes of course, but if you are used to metric units it's pretty hard to develop a good intuition around pounds, cups, inches and ounces, and I find intuition and the ability to clearly visualize proportions pretty important when cooking.
  - comex 11y ago
    Yes, while if you have prior experience with cooking in the US (but are still interested in the science), then you are used to pounds, cups, inches, and ounces, and may find it hard to develop a good intuition around liters and grams. (Also, it will be easier to find things like measuring cups and spoons delimited in the former.) They're just units...
    - Jedd 11y ago
      > They're just units... Indeed. Units that correlate (1kg water == 1 litre of water) and are intuitive (100C = boiling water). The fact that the imperial units aren't even common amongst the two remaining countries that use some number of them is just 12oz of icing on the cake. It's frustrating to find an otherwise fine cooking or science book ruined by the prose pandering to some elderly subset of 5% of the population.
      - Avshalom 11y ago
        1/20 of the planet's population is not 1/20 of the market's population, particularly when writing in English.
      - comex 11y ago
        I understand the sentiment, but I think you are underestimating the subset of the population that traditional units "pander" to - including, anecdotally, me. I'm 23, far from elderly, and like many of the people on this site, work with computers for a living; I'm not uneducated or anti-intellectual. But I have minimal background in the physical sciences, so never got much exposure to metric units that way, and living in the US, I've never really needed them outside of that. Sure, the metric units are for the most part inherently superior (although I'm a fan of degrees Fahrenheit [1]), while especially for cooking the traditional ones are a mess: e.g. the relationship between tablespoons and teaspoons and the two types of ounces is something which, since I haven't invested that much time in cooking either (I'm working on it), I still haven't memorized. Yet the traditional ones are still what I and many others have been almost exclusively exposed to. Sure, I could go out of my way to buy utensils and look up measurements in metric. On one hand, it would be a bit more forward thinking, especially since I want to try living in Japan at some point and there would be one less change to worry about. On the other, here and now, it would make it harder to talk about recipes with other people. But mostly I just don't care. They're just units. If units "ruin" a book for you then you should reconsider your standards of evaluation. [1] http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-67227.jpg http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-6...
      - lsaferite 11y ago
        > elderly subset of 5% of the population He's writing a book for a US audience. The US audience uses US customary units for measurement and has done so since 'forever' basically. The subset of US citizens that knows metric well enough to be comfortable using it for things like cooking is small enough to be irrelevant for his book. Would it be better to use the metric system for everything in the US? Of course. Will it happen in the next 100 years? Nope. And I'm really confused about the elderly part of your statement. Do you correlate being young in the US with knowing the metric system? If so you are unfortunately wrong. Actually you are more likely to find metric knowledge in the general populous in the older crowed due to an attempt in the 70's to convert to the metric system. So, outside of areas that use metric internally, the older population is more likely to know metric than the younger ones.
  - jghn 11y ago
    That's orthogonal to whether or not kenji was being scientific in his methods
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Symbiote 11y ago
I had a look using Amazon's preview of the book. It uses "imperial" units, though I assume they're actually "English" units (i.e. American rather than British). This matters for volumes, a British pint is larger ("a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter", as my grandma taught me). It has a few conversions in the introduction, but with false precision -- an oven temperature of 300F is converted to 149C. It argues against using volume measures for dry or sticky ingredients, but the only example I see in the preview asks for "2 tablespoons of butter".
- jghn 11y ago
  Kenji has stated many times on SE when this comes up that he's catering to US home cooks with measurements
imgabe 11y ago
The units have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not something is scientific.
- gopowerranger 11y ago
  When you add salt to bread, and the recipe calls for one teaspoon, a teaspoon of kosher salt is not the same as table salt or sea salt. So how much is it? (It's significantly different.) When something calls for three cups of flour, and it's a humid day, or a dry day, does that affect the quantity? Yes it does. Significantly enough to affect bread. Both of the above reasons are why bread bakers weigh all their ingredients, including water.
  - imgabe 11y ago
    You can weigh things with either metric or imperial units. Measuring volume when you want to know mass is a mistake you can make regardless of what units you're using. I don't see how weighing the flour will help. A given volume of moist flour will weigh more than dry flour because of the water in it, so you'd still have a problem on humid days.
    - gopowerranger 11y ago
      "I don't see how weighing the flour will help." Said no serious bread baker ever.
    - fanf2 11y ago
      You can't weigh things with Imperial units because they are British units of volume. You weigh things with avoirdupois units.
  - kbutler 11y ago
    Age and storage conditions of the flour have much more to do with the moisture content than the humidity of the individual day. But yes, measure by weight. pounds vs kilograms isn't particularly important (as long as you keep them straight!)
  - 11y ago
ThePhysicist 11y ago
Since this is getting downvoted a lot by "imperialists": I do not say that one cannot work scientifically using non-metric units, I'm just saying that it has a non-scientific appeal since even in the US scientific publications normally use SI units (kg, m, s) since they are well defined and easy to calculate with. Imperial units, on the contrary, are based on the length of body parts and sticks or the volume of some arbitrary measurement cup. Granted, the meter is a bit arbitrary as well (but at least based on the geometry of the planet), but the nice thing about metric units is that they can be converted easily: 100 cm = 1 m, 1000 m = 1 km. 1000 g = 1 kg. Try that with inches, feet, yards and miles. So I really stay with my assessment that working in non-metric/SI units is contradictory to professional scientific work.
- AceJohnny2 11y ago
  Good thing he's a professional american cook, not a professional scientist.
  - ThePhysicist 11y ago
    Again, I'm not trying to devalue the work of the author here, I just say that his choice of units is non-scientific.
- andor 11y ago
  based on the length of body parts and sticks or the volume of some arbitrary measurement cup Let's not forget the weight of a stone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)

jghn 11y ago

I don't have it in front of me but he typically gives us volume and also grams for measurement. That said I fail to see why semantic sugar like units would really skew your opinion here, at the end of the day his book is aimed at a home cook. It's not modernist cuisine

ThePhysicist 11y ago
Yes of course, but if you are used to metric units it's pretty hard to develop a good intuition around pounds, cups, inches and ounces, and I find intuition and the ability to clearly visualize proportions pretty important when cooking.
- comex 11y ago
  Yes, while if you have prior experience with cooking in the US (but are still interested in the science), then you are used to pounds, cups, inches, and ounces, and may find it hard to develop a good intuition around liters and grams. (Also, it will be easier to find things like measuring cups and spoons delimited in the former.) They're just units...
  - Jedd 11y ago
    > They're just units... Indeed. Units that correlate (1kg water == 1 litre of water) and are intuitive (100C = boiling water). The fact that the imperial units aren't even common amongst the two remaining countries that use some number of them is just 12oz of icing on the cake. It's frustrating to find an otherwise fine cooking or science book ruined by the prose pandering to some elderly subset of 5% of the population.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      1/20 of the planet's population is not 1/20 of the market's population, particularly when writing in English.
    - comex 11y ago
      I understand the sentiment, but I think you are underestimating the subset of the population that traditional units "pander" to - including, anecdotally, me. I'm 23, far from elderly, and like many of the people on this site, work with computers for a living; I'm not uneducated or anti-intellectual. But I have minimal background in the physical sciences, so never got much exposure to metric units that way, and living in the US, I've never really needed them outside of that. Sure, the metric units are for the most part inherently superior (although I'm a fan of degrees Fahrenheit [1]), while especially for cooking the traditional ones are a mess: e.g. the relationship between tablespoons and teaspoons and the two types of ounces is something which, since I haven't invested that much time in cooking either (I'm working on it), I still haven't memorized. Yet the traditional ones are still what I and many others have been almost exclusively exposed to. Sure, I could go out of my way to buy utensils and look up measurements in metric. On one hand, it would be a bit more forward thinking, especially since I want to try living in Japan at some point and there would be one less change to worry about. On the other, here and now, it would make it harder to talk about recipes with other people. But mostly I just don't care. They're just units. If units "ruin" a book for you then you should reconsider your standards of evaluation. [1] http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-67227.jpg http://lolsnaps.com/upload_pic/FahrenheitVsCelsiusVsKelvin-6...
    - lsaferite 11y ago
      > elderly subset of 5% of the population He's writing a book for a US audience. The US audience uses US customary units for measurement and has done so since 'forever' basically. The subset of US citizens that knows metric well enough to be comfortable using it for things like cooking is small enough to be irrelevant for his book. Would it be better to use the metric system for everything in the US? Of course. Will it happen in the next 100 years? Nope. And I'm really confused about the elderly part of your statement. Do you correlate being young in the US with knowing the metric system? If so you are unfortunately wrong. Actually you are more likely to find metric knowledge in the general populous in the older crowed due to an attempt in the 70's to convert to the metric system. So, outside of areas that use metric internally, the older population is more likely to know metric than the younger ones.
- jghn 11y ago
  That's orthogonal to whether or not kenji was being scientific in his methods

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Symbiote 11y ago

I had a look using Amazon's preview of the book. It uses "imperial" units, though I assume they're actually "English" units (i.e. American rather than British). This matters for volumes, a British pint is larger ("a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter", as my grandma taught me). It has a few conversions in the introduction, but with false precision -- an oven temperature of 300F is converted to 149C. It argues against using volume measures for dry or sticky ingredients, but the only example I see in the preview asks for "2 tablespoons of butter".

jghn 11y ago
Kenji has stated many times on SE when this comes up that he's catering to US home cooks with measurements

imgabe 11y ago

The units have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not something is scientific.

gopowerranger 11y ago
When you add salt to bread, and the recipe calls for one teaspoon, a teaspoon of kosher salt is not the same as table salt or sea salt. So how much is it? (It's significantly different.) When something calls for three cups of flour, and it's a humid day, or a dry day, does that affect the quantity? Yes it does. Significantly enough to affect bread. Both of the above reasons are why bread bakers weigh all their ingredients, including water.
- imgabe 11y ago
  You can weigh things with either metric or imperial units. Measuring volume when you want to know mass is a mistake you can make regardless of what units you're using. I don't see how weighing the flour will help. A given volume of moist flour will weigh more than dry flour because of the water in it, so you'd still have a problem on humid days.
  - gopowerranger 11y ago
    "I don't see how weighing the flour will help." Said no serious bread baker ever.
  - fanf2 11y ago
    You can't weigh things with Imperial units because they are British units of volume. You weigh things with avoirdupois units.
- kbutler 11y ago
  Age and storage conditions of the flour have much more to do with the moisture content than the humidity of the individual day. But yes, measure by weight. pounds vs kilograms isn't particularly important (as long as you keep them straight!)
- 11y ago

ThePhysicist 11y ago

Since this is getting downvoted a lot by "imperialists": I do not say that one cannot work scientifically using non-metric units, I'm just saying that it has a non-scientific appeal since even in the US scientific publications normally use SI units (kg, m, s) since they are well defined and easy to calculate with. Imperial units, on the contrary, are based on the length of body parts and sticks or the volume of some arbitrary measurement cup. Granted, the meter is a bit arbitrary as well (but at least based on the geometry of the planet), but the nice thing about metric units is that they can be converted easily: 100 cm = 1 m, 1000 m = 1 km. 1000 g = 1 kg. Try that with inches, feet, yards and miles. So I really stay with my assessment that working in non-metric/SI units is contradictory to professional scientific work.

AceJohnny2 11y ago
Good thing he's a professional american cook, not a professional scientist.
- ThePhysicist 11y ago
  Again, I'm not trying to devalue the work of the author here, I just say that his choice of units is non-scientific.
andor 11y ago
based on the length of body parts and sticks or the volume of some arbitrary measurement cup Let's not forget the weight of a stone! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)