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Comment by watt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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