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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 teaspoon

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. I can see why it would help though.

jameshart 6y ago
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.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  Do recipes also say 200g of eggs, or just four eggs?
  - alexchamberlain 6y ago
    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.
    - hcheemskerk 6y ago
      >a regulated weight range Under a single region-bound regulatory body, making it useless internationally.
      - brigandish 6y ago
        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.
        globular-toast 6y ago
        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).
        NikolaeVarius 6y ago
        > it is considered not fit for human consumption due to the bleaching process Pretty far up there on "dumbest things I've ever heard/read"
        globular-toast 6y ago
        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.
      - oh_sigh 6y ago
        The good news is that everyone puts their life story before you get to the recipe, so you'll know if they're American or not.
      - xxs 6y ago
        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.
  - chooseaname 6y ago
    Yes (both are correct).
  - bch 6y ago
    I saw a pasta recipe[0] the other day that said ~ Wet ingredients: “2 eggs, 3 yolks, plus water to bring it to 185g” [0] https://youtu.be/m_fu5RaXMVk?t=246 https://youtu.be/m_fu5RaXMVk?t=246
    - jorgesborges 6y ago
      Some recipes require only egg whites or only egg yolks — or a combination of both.
  - jameshart 6y ago
    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'.
    - rs23296008n1 6y ago
      Eggs come in different sizes. There can be 100% size differences depending on the type of bird. Typical variation is usually a lot lower. Yes, even from what you might call an ordinary chicken. I know this because I have chickens. One hen lays eggs 50% bigger than the others. Another frequently does double yolks. This is far from uncommon.
      - jameshart 6y ago
        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.
        rs23296008n1 6y ago
        Yeah I do the same. I also put "large egg" on those recipes. Sometimes it matters. Proportions of egg to flour can be significant for some recipes.
  - mxcrossb 6y ago
    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.
    - brigandish 6y ago
      You don't weigh your eggs?
    - jameshart 6y ago
      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.
  - Asooka 6y ago
    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.
mattkrause 6y ago
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.
- rurp 6y ago
  Great comment. I think a word got missed :), "put the bowl or pot on the scale".
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Yeah, they accidentally that word there. (sorry, couldn't help myself)
- globular-toast 6y ago
  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? So many deficiencies.
  - db48x 6y ago
    Butter is labelled in tablespoons on the package. You just slice it at the about the right spot. Do an image search for a "stick of butter".
    - jehb 6y ago
      Counterpoint: The butter we often buy comes in tubs. So we measure by weight when possible, and approximate the volumetric conversions.
      - globular-toast 6y ago
flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
The USA still uses miles and inches... I'm not surprised that their baking recipe protocols are 230 years out of date as well.
- distantaidenn 6y ago
  The imperial system isn’t what we use instead of the metric system — we use it in addition to. Yet, with our “outdated” systems, we seem to have still done alright with regards to our tech, Michelin starred restaurants, etc.
  - gehatare 6y ago
    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.
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  Power of 2 volumetric measures are actually quite nice.
  - jameshart 6y ago
    Can you be specific as to what they are nice for? 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?
    - brigandish 6y ago
      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.
cesaref 6y ago
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!
chongli 6y ago
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.
- jerrre 6y ago
  assuming the volume of flour changes with humidity because it contains more moisture, wouldn't it also increase the weight? Not an expert by any means though, so correct me if I'm wrong
  - runxel 6y ago
    No, not at all. Volume ≠ Weight. Another example: Some books use paper with bigger volume (so it looks thicker) but of course they are not twice as heavy suddenly.
  - chongli 6y ago
    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.

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. I can see why it would help though.

jameshart 6y ago

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.

tedunangst 6y ago
Do recipes also say 200g of eggs, or just four eggs?
- alexchamberlain 6y ago
  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.
  - hcheemskerk 6y ago
    >a regulated weight range Under a single region-bound regulatory body, making it useless internationally.
    - brigandish 6y ago
      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.
      - globular-toast 6y ago
        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).
        NikolaeVarius 6y ago
        > it is considered not fit for human consumption due to the bleaching process Pretty far up there on "dumbest things I've ever heard/read"
        globular-toast 6y ago
        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.
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      The good news is that everyone puts their life story before you get to the recipe, so you'll know if they're American or not.
    - xxs 6y ago
      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.
- chooseaname 6y ago
  Yes (both are correct).
- bch 6y ago
  I saw a pasta recipe[0] the other day that said ~ Wet ingredients: “2 eggs, 3 yolks, plus water to bring it to 185g” [0] https://youtu.be/m_fu5RaXMVk?t=246 https://youtu.be/m_fu5RaXMVk?t=246
  - jorgesborges 6y ago
    Some recipes require only egg whites or only egg yolks — or a combination of both.
- jameshart 6y ago
  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'.
  - rs23296008n1 6y ago
    Eggs come in different sizes. There can be 100% size differences depending on the type of bird. Typical variation is usually a lot lower. Yes, even from what you might call an ordinary chicken. I know this because I have chickens. One hen lays eggs 50% bigger than the others. Another frequently does double yolks. This is far from uncommon.
    - jameshart 6y ago
      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.
      - rs23296008n1 6y ago
        Yeah I do the same. I also put "large egg" on those recipes. Sometimes it matters. Proportions of egg to flour can be significant for some recipes.
- mxcrossb 6y ago
  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.
  - brigandish 6y ago
    You don't weigh your eggs?
  - jameshart 6y ago
    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.
- Asooka 6y ago
  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.

mattkrause 6y ago

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.

rurp 6y ago
Great comment. I think a word got missed :), "put the bowl or pot on the scale".
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Yeah, they accidentally that word there. (sorry, couldn't help myself)
globular-toast 6y ago
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? So many deficiencies.
- db48x 6y ago
  Butter is labelled in tablespoons on the package. You just slice it at the about the right spot. Do an image search for a "stick of butter".
  - jehb 6y ago
    Counterpoint: The butter we often buy comes in tubs. So we measure by weight when possible, and approximate the volumetric conversions.
    - globular-toast 6y ago

flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago

The USA still uses miles and inches... I'm not surprised that their baking recipe protocols are 230 years out of date as well.

distantaidenn 6y ago
The imperial system isn’t what we use instead of the metric system — we use it in addition to. Yet, with our “outdated” systems, we seem to have still done alright with regards to our tech, Michelin starred restaurants, etc.
- gehatare 6y ago
  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.
jimktrains2 6y ago
Power of 2 volumetric measures are actually quite nice.
- jameshart 6y ago
  Can you be specific as to what they are nice for? 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?
  - brigandish 6y ago
    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.

cesaref 6y ago

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!

chongli 6y ago

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.

jerrre 6y ago
assuming the volume of flour changes with humidity because it contains more moisture, wouldn't it also increase the weight? Not an expert by any means though, so correct me if I'm wrong
- runxel 6y ago
  No, not at all. Volume ≠ Weight. Another example: Some books use paper with bigger volume (so it looks thicker) but of course they are not twice as heavy suddenly.
- chongli 6y ago
  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.