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.
I can see why it would help though.
You can even retare the scale between ingredients if you don’t want to do mental math.
So many deficiencies.
(sorry, couldn't help myself)
Under a single region-bound regulatory body, making it useless internationally.
Otherwise, most people will know how much an egg weighs, especially if they bake regularly.
Pretty far up there on "dumbest things I've ever heard/read"
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'.
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.
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.
> It turns out that not all eggs are the same.
You can weigh eggs, or more often it's actually sufficient to balance the liquid to offset the variation in eggs -- a lot of baking especially isn't just about taste - but about consistency and proper proportions to get repeatable texture and density. It is also generally speaking quite sufficient to deal with food liquids in volume as well since room temperature differences are controlled close enough such that it doesn't matter.
The difference in weight of a cup of water between 20 C and 25 C is negligible.
1 cup of flour on the other hand can vary in actual material by over 20% because of numerous variables from clumping to type of flour.
> 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.
Basically bullshit again because: In most cases, the working surface flour won't amount to even 1% of the final product, however as stated volume vs. weight can make double-digit differences.
Your whole "10 gram" of sugar claim is a straw-man.
Baking and pastries tends to require a lot more precision then basic cooking to get repeatable edible results. It's the one reason why pre-made cake mixes and Bisquik are so popular, even with professional chefs.
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.
The vast majority of cooking is done by sight, feel, smell and taste. The key to repeatability is to adjust based on experience. 'Hmm, this doesn't taste right, i think it needs a little more vinegar/sugar/whatever to bring it together'. That's the art in cooking.
Now there is science as well, and this tends to come into play with techniques and ingredients which change considerably when cooked, so things like baking, or bread making (there are lots of examples, but these are a good place to start). You'll find plenty of cooks who say they can't make great cakes, and generally it's because they aren't good at measuring. Bread making is a little bit of both. With the starting point you do tend to adjust as you go along. After a first rise when you knock the bread back you get a feel for how the dough is behaving, and add a little more flour (typically) to bring things under control. Yeast is a live ingredient so you get batch to batch variations you need to correct for.
I'm not convinced by your argument about America and cups - you'll not find that in American restaurants, and I can't remember Americans complaining about how restaurant food 'just doesn't taste right' or something like that!
Not an expert by any means though, so correct me if I'm wrong
Whether you pack flour down or sift it through a sieve into your measuring cup can make a huge difference in the weight.
Another example: Some books use paper with bigger volume (so it looks thicker) but of course they are not twice as heavy suddenly.
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!
For examples, we do use parking meters!
It's the reason I might choose Ruby over C (convenience - Ruby was designed to be centred around the human, like many Imperial measures, and non-decimal currency btw), or use feet instead of metres (because I have feet that are, astonishingly, close to a foot long) or any other number of examples where metric is not the best or a better choice.
I'll leave you to divide 100 by 3 or 12 so I can buy 1 or 4 of those dozen eggs you're selling with £1 while this Victorian street urchin who's had little to no schooling beats you at it because they're using a non-decimal currency with more factors…
tl;dr People in the past weren't stupid, they just had less access to the technology required to maintain a metric or decimal system in a widespread number of contexts. The existence of such technology does not obviate their usefulness.
Yet, with our “outdated” systems, we seem to have still done alright with regards to our tech, Michelin starred restaurants, etc.
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?
> 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.
The problems that the poster one-higher stated are trivial. 128/3 = 42 2/3 ozs. 1/7 of a gallon in ozs is 8/7 * 16 in ozs = just over 18 ozs. 1/7 of a quart is just that answer divided by 4, 4.6 as an off the cuff calculation.
That's a good point, the good old fluid ounce or "floz" as I would read it as a child. I did used to wonder who Floz was and what she'd done to deserve having her name in so many recipe books :)
You seem to be hung up on converting between place values. When you say, quick, how many cups in a pint" it's like asking "quick, how many grams in a kilogram!" You'd look at the person funny.
"How many grams in a kilogram?" is a strange question because the answer is self-evident.
There are more steps in the power-of-two measures, but hardly anything unreasonable.
The real usability of the metric system, which I think you're getting at is that those prefixes are reüsable between all units, whereas in the us customary system it's no holds barred and everything outside the volumetric is arbitrary.
That said, with length, it is nice having units that break apart evenly at 2, 3, 4, and 6; but I don't think that's quite enough to redeem it.