4 ms·

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.

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.