Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Since my mom moved to town, we've been eating at her place frequently. She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy. Lots of butter, cheese, coconut milk, etc. We've asked my mom to cut those things in half.

She's a very good cook, and the things she improvises or makes from memory are much lighter fare. I learned to cook from her, so my meals tend to be fairly light too.

Sure, the fat and salt (and don't forget sugar) are yummy, but they'll kill you. There needs to be a compromise.

An amusing aside, Julia Child said that it's perfectly honorable to be a home cook and not a chef. Making stuff that's good but healthy is an art unto itself, especially if you're feeding vegetarians.

View on HN

> She uses a lot of recipes from the NY Times. They are heavy.

There’s a good chocolate chip cookie recipe from the NYT that I’ve used several times. Not only is it heavy, I’ve had to halve the ingredients and even then it still produces enough to satiate the Cookie Monster for probably at least a month.

As a Brit, I also had to convert all of the measurements (patent absurdities like ‘cups of butter’, ‘tablespoons of chocolate’, etc.) to grams — taking account of the variation in density, of course.

Some of the measurements are aided by how the ingredients are packaged. For instance, butter is sold by the pound, in boxes of 4 "sticks" that are marked as being 1/4 cup each, which ignores the density variation but is familiar to every home cook. Chocolate comes in "squares" that are some predictable amount. In fact some recipes call for squares.

"A pint's a pound the world around" is a workable rule of thumb for a lot of things, but of course you need to know when greater precision is needed. Since I don't bake sweets very often, I measure most things by eyeball. For instance my bread recipe is based on filling a glass measuring cup nearly to the top, above where the volume markings end.

Maybe it's a reaction to spending my day designing precision measuring equipment.

But yeah, it's a hodgepodge of archaic units, and quite unnerving if you hail from the metric world.

If it was at least all in cups, it’d be somewhat more forgivable. I’ve even seen recipes using amounts of flour measured in a combination of cups and tablespoons! Actually, maybe that doesn’t sound as mad to everyone as it does to me…

Anyway, it makes more sense hearing that sticks of butter are labelled in cups. I didn’t know that! In the UK, butter comes in 250g blocks.

Yeah, especially since the density of flour varies. All the home bakers I know either weigh their flour, or eyeball it like I do and live with the imprecision.

I'd just let the flour mound over the top of the cup by a bit to make up for the tablespoons. ;-)

A scale's cheap and if it's in a situation where accuracy matters, I use it if the measurements are given or consult a standard conversion. And as someone in the US I tend to use grams for the purpose to avoid faffing with a combination of units. And I don't even mind at all using US Imperial for many things on a day-to-day basis,

Agreed - eyeballing it (or volume measurement for that matter) is good enough for the vast majority of baking recipes. I have made some finicky recipes in my day, but generally you will not need the precision of measuring by weight. For some reason people online hype up how exact you "need" to be when baking, but it's just not true. Hilariously, people also act like you can just completely wing it with no precision at all when cooking on the stove, and that also isn't true. Both forms of cooking benefit from some measurements and consistency, but you don't have to go too crazy with it.

> live with the imprecision

Exactly that. In a restaurant, you're really pressured to make it the same each time.

At home: Who cares? It's good that it's different every time.

I hate it when my cooking comes out different every time. Reproducible results are super important even at home, imo.

Sticks of butter are also labeled in tablespoons here. One stick is 1/2c, and the paper it is wrapped in also has markings for 1-8 tbsp. So it's pretty common to see that in US recipes as well.

As far as flour goes, it's incredibly common to have both cups and measuring spoons in a US kitchen. So if a recipe says "1 cup and 2 tablespoons" or something, it's really easy to measure that.

By contrast, I hate recipes which use weight measurements. It takes a ton of faffing about to get exactly 300g (or whatever weight) of flour weighed out. Add a bit... watch scale... add a bit more... watch scale ad nauseam. And then I often wind up overshooting anyways, so then I have to try to scoop some back out! Whereas with volume measurements I just dip a cup/spoon in, level it off, and I'm done in a couple of seconds.

When doing sensitive receips like some breads you need gram level accuracy to get the right result. The density vary too much.

For similar accuracy to what you have with cups and spoons, you don't need to bother making the measurement exactly 300g.

A relative was a professional cook. Butter wrappers are also marked with measurements here, at 25g intervals. That would be accepted for some recipes, but the butter would be measured more carefully when making certain pastries or cakes.

Since you're replying to a Brit, I'll point out the irony that

> "A pint's a pound the world around"

only applies to the American meaning of "world", i.e. the USA and maybe Canada.

"A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter," when it's an Imperial pint.

What's a pound though? Not so global.

To a first approximation, fat won't kill you. There's no reliable evidence that a diet relatively higher in fat causes worse health outcomes, as long as you maintain energy balance. Salt won't kill you either, unless you're genetically susceptible to hypertension and don't drink enough water. The sugar is more problematic.

Halving is a neat trick. In my experience you can usually safely halve the amount of sugar in most cake recipes and still get a great cake that is sweet enough.

It can't do it with everything but sugar is probably the thing I'm most inclined to go "Nah, that's too much" in recipes. (Often, online, I'll see what people say in the comments too.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com