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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how americans manage to feed themselves, while measuring things with cups! It's such a bizarre and archaic unit. Like the english stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)

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Until recently, it was a lot easier to lay your hands on a decent set of measuring cups than a good electronic balance. The spring ones weren't very precise, and weights are easy to lose and make a mess. Measuring cups are cheap and simple, and doubling and halving recipes (the most common operations) is elementary-school math.

Even European recipes still measure small amounts for flavors, leaveners, etc. in volumes. A scale that's precise to sub-gram levels is more expensive. So it's not as if you're not familiar with the concept.

Now that electronic ones are cheap it's clearly the better choice, especially for flour, but that's only in the last decade or two. People are switching over to scales, but the volume measurements are perfectly adequate and they're what our existing cookbooks call for.

I'm not American (Canadian living in Germany) and I have to say that I find using cups/spoons is much easier than pulling out a scale and weighing everything. Just grab a measuring cup / spoon (every house has a set of standard sized measuring cups and spoons) fill it up to the right amount and dump it in.

Cups work great for certain things, such as a cup of water, sugar, flour, or peanuts. It gets difficult in other situations though, like trying to measure a cup of spinach, strawberries, or ice, because the measurement greatly varies depending on how the items are packed or arranged in the space.

Measuring volume is not great for flour for the same reason, it contains very different amounts of air depending on whether it’s packed or sifted.

Which is why most recipes say something like "1 cup of flour, sifted" - you have to measure it, then sift it.

Uh...

That’s so much more work than just weighing it.

Just use a german measuring cup which has like 30 different scales for everything you might want to measure in volume and weight, e.g. https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01BAU2N62/ ?

That’s what we commonly use which is easier to use than just weighing everything, but still just as accurate.

But you have to admit, a gram of flour and a gram of sugar are very strange units of volume. Better to just use millilitres or cups or something.

Well they allow you to measure with a measuring cup, or with a scale, whatever you prefer, and easily allow scaling a recipe up or down :)

How do you fill a cup with apple slices?

Carefully, if you don't want to end up with applesauce.

It's quite easy to fill a cup with apple slices. You won't get an accurate, reproducible measurement this way, but the procedure itself isn't difficult. If accuracy isn't that important, then it works okay.

Using a scale is even easier, especially for things like bread, you can just pour ingredients directly into your bowl until you hit the right amount, zero it and move onto the next thing. No guesswork of trying to fill a cup, no separate measuring device needed, just pour and tare.

It also solves to many issues with ingredients that will just never have equal density, flour variances, packing brown sugar by hand, etc are things of the past.

Another great spot is stuff like butter where you wind up cutting off different sizes all the time, and always have a few assorted scraps kicking around, using a scale solves that, just pile scraps up til you get the right amount.

Not every house has a set of standard cups and spoons. We leave a scale on our counter and when were mixing ingredients, we put the bowl on the scale, add and tare.

I think it depends on the recipe. For baking, I find the scale easier: add flour, hit tare, add sugar, hit tare, etc.

For a recipe where ingredients go in at different times and require different prep, and measurements are approximate anyway, weighing is more trouble.

Australians, Indonesians, Germans all measure recipes with two kinds of spoons (!). Australians also use cups (that are 10-12 mL bigger than American ones); other countries may too.

I wonder if the ideal country where no-one uses units of volume other than litres and millilitres actually exists.

The really bizarre units of volume are certainly the ones I've seen in Europe - where you get measures marked in "grams of flour" and "grams of sugar". I suppose no-one has ever asked for a hundred grams of sugar of flour, but I'm tempted to every time I see one of them.

"Grams of flour" isn't volume, it's mass. You stick your mixing bowl on the scale, hit "tare", and add flour until you hit the right mass. Then hit tare, add the next ingredient until it hits the right mass, etc. Much more accurate, which is needed for good consistent baking. Also much faster.

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