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Comment by SAI_Peregrinus | Hacker News Reader

Spoons and Cups are exact volumes.

1 tsp (US) is 4.928922ml. 1 tsp (UK) is 4.859917ml. 1 tbsp is 3 tsp. 1 cup is 16tsp (of the same variety).

Watching a European cook American recipes is a delight. "What the fuck is a cup?" Umm... Google says 240 milliliters. "Ok. How much butter is that in grams??"

And so on, while the rest of the food is burning/sticking/melting.

Plus, a "stick" of butter is not sold in Germany. What they have is more than two sticks joined side-by-side.

Well, problem number one is that you're trying to do volume of butter instead of weight. All the sticks are by weight, so even though they're marked with tbsp on the side (8), the stick is a quarter lb (4oz). So the notional volume is 4 fl oz, and the weight is 4 oz, but the density is not equal to water.

The other problem is that density of things can vary wildly. Flour can be 30% different in density depending on how you scoop it ( scoop it into the measuring cup vs scooping with the measuring cup).

And of course problem number three is not converting your measurements before you start cooking, just like it's a problem not to mise-en-place your ingredients first. (If you mise-en-place, you've probably got the correct measures of ingredients already).

I prefer to measure powders by mass, liquids by volume. Butter is weird, since it's a solid but has a pretty consistent density, so it's easy to just cut off the amount needed. It's very rare that a precise amount of butter is necessary, so it's faster to use volume for it than it is to shave off slices onto a scale.

For liquids maybe, but for dry ingredients not so much. Weights are better if you want consistent outcomes.

Most recipes have some slack in them. If you're dialing in a single shot of espresso, you want to make sure you have an exact weight for inputs and outputs. If you're baking a cake, 7 grams difference in how much flour you use doesn't matter.

Notably, for a lot of ingredients, recipes don't even try. "4 eggs" is always approximate since eggs aren't the same size. Recipes with peppers always mention you need to play around and use judgement because both size and capsaicin amounts vary quite a bit from batch to batch.

Yup. I see a lot of "cooking for engineers" engage in this sort of false precision. In truth, for a huge number of recipes, you can dramatically vary ingredient amounts with no major consequences. And even in baking people overstate the needed precision. Even if you weigh flour in grams, your eggs are imprecise and your mixing technique is imprecise and your oven temperature is imprecise and the times listed are imprecise (have you ever seen a recipe say "bake for 22 minutes and 15 seconds").

To be fair, engineers put false and unnecesary precision on everything.

If it was cooking for machinists, every measure would come with a specified tolerance

Indeed, but (arguably) exact volumes are not exact quantities for non-liquids

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