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Comment by jeremydavid | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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