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Comment by Broken_Hippo | Hacker News Reader

You are assuming a stick of butter doesn't have a standard amount, which simply isn't true. Each stick is a half of a cup and is a quarter of a pound even if the dimensions of the stick are different. If you need less, there are marking to cut it, much like the markings for grams on the butter in Norway.

If I'm converting from sticks to grams, I use the above information as a guide or simply weigh it. The information to covert it is easily found online, I've done it many times - mostly, I've not lived in the US for many years yet I still want to make familiar foods.

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> You are assuming a stick of butter doesn't have a standard amount,

No I'm not, it's just completely unknown here (and I believe in most of the world). Don't make me look up '1 stick butter size' when I'm trying to follow your recipe..

The reason I say it's more annoying than cups (which are arguably worse because I said there's multiple, but in practice they're so close it's not likely to matter) is I suppose just that it's enough less common that I don't have 250ml in the back of my mind when I read it.

When I first came across it it was even worse, I assumed it was like 'a knob' (knife off a little 'stick' of butter from the block), which is obviously much less than it is, and didn't think to look it up as something standard but unfamiilar to me.

Sorry, re-reading that was really unclear. I meant '*as I said there's multiple', and that cups are common enough that I remember 250ml as good enough, whereas sticks I don't come across often enough to remember whatever it is.

To be fair, if you don't live in the US, how would you know that a stick is a standardized measure?

...is it a standardized measure?

(Out of curiosity, is it a regulated measure? Would I be prosecuted for selling a stick of butter that doesn't weigh 1/4 of a pound?)

In my country we wouldn't describe a solid in cups, just grams.

It’s not a regulated measure, just traditional that each stick is half a cup and the wrapper has 8 marks so you can slice off a tablespoon easily. Each stick is 113g

Sticks are marked with tablespoon markings on their wrappers.

> if you don't live in the US, how would you know that a stick is a standardized measure?

Because you ran into it in the first place. You think cookbooks are giving out subjective instructions?

"You said stick, but I don't know what that means" is a pretty reasonable conclusion to draw when you encounter the usage. "You said stick; you must not believe that words have meanings" is something else again.

As someone not from the US, a "stick" sounds as precise a quantity as a "handful", a "dollop", a "pinch", a "dash", a "splash", or a "spoonful".

An obvious analogy for the lack of precision of "stick of butter" outside of US culture is my culture's "block of butter" - typically, a block of butter in my country is 500g. But not always.

So how do you know how much butter I intended you to use if I say "add half a block of butter" in my biscuit recipe?

How big is a block of butter where you live? Do they even sell it by the block? Or is it just sticks? Rough mental calculation, there's about 4 and nearly a half sticks to the block.

I guess there's a reason humans developed and use units of measurement.

Anecdote time! When I was young I tried to follow a recipe off the Internet that specified a stick of butter. So I diligently cut a long skinny bit of butter from my block of butter, a little confused as to what difference the shape made. The biscuits were rather awful.

A stick is a shape. There are various shapes of butter in the US. Almost all butter that is wrapped in soft paper and has a “stick” or rectangle shape is 8oz (227g) for 2 “sticks” or 1 stick (block) that’s basically 2 sticks put together (Kerrygold). The larger packages are a pound, 16oz (~253.6g) and usually contain 4 sticks.

There are some exceptions like Amish butter that come in a 2 pound roll (round block). Kerrygold and Finlandia butter from Europe adapt to the 8oz and 16oz standards just like a US company would adapt to UK or likely EU standards.

If you said block of butter to me, I would assume 4 sticks or 1 lbs as you can buy it as such unseperated for bulk baking. See: https://www.495expressfoods.com/products/butter-salted-1lb-b...

Ah yep, so similar, but smaller than our typical block size of 500g. Although these days a lot of the fancier butter comes as 250g.

This is probably one of my country's fanciest butter makers: https://lewisroadcreamery.co.nz/collections/butter

A dash is 1/8 teaspoon and a pinch is 1/16 teaspoon, if that comes up.

Sticks are used in Cajun (Southern) cooking quite often.

http://www.mrbsbistro.com/recipes_shrimp.php

First time I read it I assumed it was a PC-gone-mad 'knob' of butter.

Oh yeah, I forgot about a "knob" of butter.

To be fair, if you don't live in the US, how would you know that a stick is a standardized measure?

I'm American. I lived in the US until around 8.5 years ago and I moved to Norway. I've had to look up conversions many times so that I could cook comfort food.

Other folks have answered the regulated measure stuff, but FWIW: Every butter maker sold sticks where I was from (Indiana) and all the sticks were the same size. Margarine brands did the same so long as they weren't sold in tubs.

> To be fair, if you don't live in the US, how would you know that a stick is a standardized measure?

Cue the funny anecdote. We've been using au pairs to help with the kids. It took about 6 months for one of us to notice that when a recipe called for "1 cup" of something, one au pair would go into the cabinet and grab a random glass and use that to measure. Our glasses range from 4 oz. to 18oz, so there were tons of size disparities. We didn't notice for so long because she was usually making rice, and the ratio was the most important part, and the ratios was cups to cups.

To be clear, that disparity had just never occurred to us, and in no way did we blame her. All of us (including her) had a good laugh over it and we showed her where the measuring cups were kept.

You never mentioned how many grams the "stick" weighs. And I have never found out. Saying it's half "a cup" is even more ridiculous. What does volume have to do with it?

Greetings from Berlin.

imperial likes to use volume or weight with units that have the same name but different values. see the ounce in weight or volume. why don’t you live it???

That's not what's going on here. American recipes (particularly in baking) traditionally use volume measurements for butter, flour and sugar rather than weight measurements. It's strictly less accurate, but also convenient if you don't have scales.

It differs a bit based on water content, but is close enough to 100 grams that you can treat it as 100 grams for anything you are likely to use butter for.

Butter is a common ingredient in pastries, which require extreme precision for consistent results

Detecting gravitational waves requires extreme precision. Pastries are in the ordinary precision range. :)

Joking aside I suspect if you are good enough where the limiting factor in your baking is the precision of butter specified as opposed to sloppy techniques you are better off using a recipe written by a professional pastry chef for other proficient bakers. In my experience they usually write quantities in terms of weight and recommend measuring it that way.

For example Claire Saffitz calls in her Confetti Cake recipe for "3 sticks unsalted butter (12 oz / 340g), at room temperature". That would indicate that the 100g approximation is 13% low.

I make a lot of pastry, actually. I've even gone to school for it, though I don't do it professionally now. Variable moisture content of flour is a bigger variable. I can't think of a case where someone would be using sticks of butter and 100 grams is not close enough.

If you're a commercial food manufacturer with a factory then yes. For everyone else up to "professional with a pastry shop" it's way less dire then you make it seem.

When you care about "extreme precision", you should also buy the same brand over and over again. In such case, the difference in sticks will not exist.

To be fair, lots of folks here in Norway use volume measurements for things like flour, but instead of cups, folks use deciliters. For volume measurements, I find cups to be more convenient because it is easier to get a "level" measurement (though I finally found a scoop with 1dl). I always have to look up how many grams a stick of butter is, by the way - 113.4 grams is the answer.

Realistically, I wind up with 3 sets of measures: I have a scale, American cups, and a large 'norwegian' measuring cup.

1 stick = 8oz (volume) = 227g

I love this. Google says 110gr. In this thread, people say 227 or 113. And when you buy in Europe, you are almost always going to buy 125gr, 250gr or 500gr.

The parent has this wrong. In the US the "volume" measurements are actually kind of a lie. You can write recipes in terms of "volume" but they're actually by weight.

1 stick of butter is 4oz by weight which is defined to be 0.5 cups (i.e when you write down 1 cup butter it means 8 oz).

Butter wasn't always standardized - that started in 1907, and as you can imagine, it wasn't universal for a bit of time (though how much, I don't know). Additionally, you can substitute a cup of some tub "butters" for the real butter called for in a recipe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter#:~:text=United%20States....

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