Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
Everything. “How far to the restaurant?” “18 cups or so”
'The music is too loud, turn it down a few cups!"
I do actually like weight better for measurements, have a scale and that IS easier, agreed. But most recipes don’t need to be so exact, and not everyone has a scale so volume measurements work. I just use a regular spoon for teaspoon and have cup measures, a small coffee cup here is 8oz, we have some of those too.
Because it’s a few dozen times faster? You can literally reach into a container and take out one cup and that’s it. Works for me ost liquids or grainy stuff. Not from US btw.
I kinda feel like in the grand scheme, it doesn’t really matter. Sure we could measure by weight, but outside of a few ingredients prone to density variation it gets us by, and really there’s just no impetus to change. 🤷
I think it goes back to Fannie Farmer in 1896, who wrote the first major and comprehensive cookbook in English that used any kind of standard measurements. European cookbooks mostly used vague instructions without any standardized weights or numbers before that. At this point in the industrialized world standardized cup measures were relatively cheap and available. Scales were relatively bulky, expensive, and inaccurate in 1896. So the whole tradition got started, and most of the major cookbooks owed something to Fannie Farmer. Cookbooks that used standardized weights probably got started in other countries much later, when scales were becoming commonplace.
So you don’t have to modify the amount when the recipe called for kosher salt but you only have sea salt. A cup of pasta? Depending on the type you end up with vastly different weight
I’m amused that my logic is the same but opposite of yours: why the fuck should I scoop and level something to get an “exact measurement”, when I could just dump into a container on a scale and get an actual exact measurement.
What’s troublesome with that is American cups are something like 237ml and a Canadian cup is 250ml, a quart a litre and a gallon 4 litres.
Makes using American recipes a bit finicky. So now I convert recipes to weight. Though I basically never use a scale or measuring cup when actually cooking.
Silly question: are all cups the same volume? I didn’t bother to measure but the cup i use to scoop rice seems very different in size from the one I use for dog food…
Nope. I mean technically they are supposed to be. But in practice, absolutely not. Im pretty sure manufacturers just make cups with random lines on it.
This is why I have a dry and a wet measuring cups. Although that still isn’t a standard. But at least if you consistently use the same cup for the same thing you can fine tune it that way.
Because it’s often easier to measure things by volume, and most cooking dishes do not need precise measurements. It sucks for baking dishes, but for anything that doesn’t need to be precise I find it way more convenient to grab a volume measurement than a scale
I would agree with this if components were sold by volume as well. I don’t really bake, but the only thing I can recall showing a volume was shredded cheese. And even still, it’s always about X cups. Otherwise, I’m buying a premixed box and doing what the label tells me to do. Sure, I’m happy to not get fleeced with shrinkflation putting fluffy shredded cheese in a 2 cup bag, but it’s still a bit of a mismatch
If you get into baking bread, you buy a scale. It doesn’t change the problem with volume vs weight, because American flour is sold in pounds, and the recipes are all in grams or bakers ratios.
What it does help with (in bread baking) is consistently and speed. It’s much faster to dump 500g of flour in a bowl than to measure out that many cups.
For almost everything else, cups are faster and easier.
Fun fact : in France we mesure by weight except for the “gâteau au yaourt”. The yoghurt cake is the most basic cake with each family having it’s own recipe, a bit like maybe muffins in other places and this cake is entierly mesured in volumes.
As an American who was taught to use cups and had recipe books that used cups, I dunno but it’s dumb. A cup of peanut butter?! Like no fucking way I’m scooping that shit into a cup then into whatever I’m making. But I did measure just like that before I knew better. I have a food scale and convert cups to a weight and I will never turn back.
Measure it out the hard way once and note the weight. I do that every time I have a recipe using cups just to make my life easier. Once the recipe is properly noted, I can just put a bowl on the scale and hit the tare button after each step.
I just yell “okay Google how much does a cup of peanut butter weigh” if Google doesn’t get me a good answer usually my husband will run in yelling the conversions he googled so I will stop yelling at the spy-assistant bot. I have encountered few ingredients that I couldn’t find a weight conversion for.
Doing by weight means u have to take the extra step of weighing it after it’s in a container.
Lol no, just weigh it as you pull it from your container. Hell, skip another step and just put your mixing bowl on the scale and zero it out. Weight measurement is so much simpler and accurate than volumetric measurements.
Method 1: you get a bowl and put it on the scale. You then dump everything into it or you get a new bowl for each ingredient if you need to keep them separate.
Method 2: you get a bowl and a cup. You measure into the cup and dump the stuff in the bowl then wash the cup and then you measure the next thing then you wash again and so on.
Sometimes washing isn’t needed, sure. But you still put stuff in the cup then move it rather than putting it directly in the bowl.
With spoons it’s even worse because for spices, for example, many of them (at least here) come like this so spoons don’t fit…so good luck pouring out of it and into a spoon and not making a mess
I’m from the UK but we have a set of cups for old recipes (and American recipes)… Honestly it’s easier in a lot of cases to measure stuff out, I like it. What’s really annoying is that US and UK cups are DIFFERENT SIZES.
Cups is a volumetric measurement. Honestly I’d be fine with switching to liters for measurements, or deciliters or whatever makes sense. Gravimetric measurements never made intuitive sense to me.
Perhaps that’s because it’s what you know best and are used to. Volumetric measurements of anything that doesn’t have a fixed density make no sense to me. What the hell is one cup of broccoli? Even a cup of flour can have wildly different ammounts of flour. My least favorite though is butter, how the hell am I supposed to measure out 3 tablespoons of butter? Melt it all on the stove and pour out what I need? I find it incredibly unintuitive.
You keep saying that, but it’s not an extra step. Weighing the food is in place of the volume measurement, not in addition.
Using volume measurement: start cutting broccoli. Add to a measuring cup until you get the right amount.
Using weight measurement: cut broccoli. Add to scale until you have the right amount (actually I would usually weigh out a single large piece, then chop it all at once - same amount of effort).
Put empty cutting board on scale. Press tare. Put broccoli on cutting board. There you go, you have just measured the weight of broccoli without taking it off the cutting board. You can’t do that with a cup.
You don’t NEED to do all that with a cup. You know how you measure a cup of brocoli? You put it in the damn cup. You don’t need to move the broccoli off the cutting board or tare your cutting board before cutting or even press any buttons. Take broccoli, add to cup. Stop when cup is full.
I brought up broccoli specifically because I recently wanted to know the nutrition facts of broccoli, and the initial google results were for 1 cup, and not 100g as is standard in I guess everywhere that uses metric. I have absolutely no idea how much broccoli that is, not only because I’m not used to it, but the dimensions of the cup and how finely chopped the broccoli is matter quite a lot in terms of how much actual broccoli we’re talking about. It’s just so ambiguous.
Most people leave the sticks of butter in the fridge with the wrappers on. If you want X tablespoons of butter, you cut through the wrapper and butter at the right mark.
I’m not saying it’s an ideal system (I also prefer recipes that use weights) but it works.
And the volume of butter changes a lot when melted. If thé recipe dont precise the form, you’ll need multiple try juste to know if you recipe actually works.
This is a thoughtless take. Do you know how hard it is to do things randomly? It takes way more work than doing things for a reason. Just because you don’t know the reason, you assume it’s arbitrary? That kind of thinking is why simple rules and instructions don’t get followed mucking up entire systems.
From another comment on this thread:
“I think it goes back to Fannie Farmer in 1896, who wrote the first major and comprehensive cookbook in English that used any kind of standard measurements. European cookbooks mostly used vague instructions without any standardized weights or numbers before that. At this point in the industrialized world standardized cup measures were relatively cheap and available. Scales were relatively bulky, expensive, and inaccurate in 1896. So the whole tradition got started, and most of the major cookbooks owed something to Fannie Farmer. Cookbooks that used standardized weights probably got started in other countries much later, when scales were becoming commonplace.”
Sure, depends where you are at and what you are baking. I make sourdough bread at least weekly totally by eye, memory and skill. I use coffee mugs most often. I used to measure things like 15 years ago but no longer need to.
Add comment