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Comment by scottmcdot | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to promote some kind of consistency in measuring? My wife disregards a lot of American cooking sites (am based in Australia) because the conversion of cups/teaspoons etc is sometimes open to interpretation and can lead to a disaster.

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I cannot understand how anyone puts up with measuring stuff by volume (other than liquids). 1 cup of flour is a hugely variable amount depending on how compressed it is. Don't even get me started on heaped cups. For baking in particular where everything needs to be very precise, it's bonkers to see recipes without weight measurements.

In the US a kitchen scale is a relatively uncommon piece of equipment. I own one, but that's primarily to service what some might call an unhealthy obsession with coffee. Thinking through the kitchens of friends and family, I can only think of one other that is similarly equipped. And that friend shares my coffee hobby.

Some of these friends without scales bake quite a lot, and do a very good job of it. I guess they're doing it on "hard mode" but they acquit themselves very well.

It's really just a non-issue. Flour could be compressed, but its not really in reality. The minor differences really don't matter much. Of course you can also sift it, which will not only help if it was somehow really heavily compressed but also breaks up clumps.

There are "official" ways to fill cups that reduce the variance a bit but you are right. Humidity, pressure and temperature also affect volume more than weight and can throw off a recipe. Plus, scales are O(1) while cups are closer to O(n) (maybe O(log n) if you have many different sizes of cups... and are willing to clean them all...)

Cue all the Americans(who have much bigger kitchens on average) explaining why scales are unnecessary and cups are the one true way.

It's open to interpretation? Not that it's an ideal measuring system, but all those units should have unambiguous metric equivalents.

I believe the suggestion is that many recipes with metric measurements will use grams (measuring mass), while most American recipes use cups/tablespoons/etc. (measuring volume). I've noticed this and have no idea why it's the case.

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