It’s very much a culturally entrenched thing now, of course, so if there’s any shift I suspect it will be very gradual. It’s easy to consider the things you’re used to as making more sense than the alternative (whether that’s true or not), so indignation (at the perceived needless complexity) tends to set in when change is suggested.
Took me ages to start thinking in metric, for example, but it feels so obvious now I’ve done so. Despite the fact that I can slice of an exact ounce of butter entirely by eye. Well, with a knife, but you know what I mean.
But I digress. British (and European, to my knowledge) recipes use a mixture: liquids are given in capacity while everything else is done in weight. But they’re the same thing - 100ml of water is 100g of water - so I frequently tend to weigh liquids too nowadays, as then - per the NYT article - it’s more precise and requires fewer containers.
I have £5 electronic scale, about the size and shape of a small mouse-mat. For any recipe I come across I simply bang the container (mixing bowl, pan, whatever) on the scale and press the tare button, then add the relevant weight of ingredient, then tare, then weigh in the next one, then tare…and so on. Dry or liquid it is all the same process, no conversion necessary other than 1ml is 1g.
I have pause when needing largish amounts of something like yoghurt, as I’ve no idea of its density. If it’s specified in ml, I’m not sure if it’s accurate to go with the ml=g conversion. That’s probably only because grammes are so damn precise that the idea of absolute precision usually being possible gets stuck in my head…but still, I’ll measure things if they’re of a sufficiently different viscosity to water to make me suspicious.
I have a cooking scale. And some of my recipe books give both weights and volumes. There area lot of situations where volume works better. For instance, if you are adding stuff to the already-hot pot, you can measure and transport your ingredient in the same vessel if you use volume. (Add 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon, 3 tablespoons of tomato paste, cook on a high flame for about a minute, stirring, then add two cups of broth…) Also, if your recipe calls for brown sugar, you need to use volume. It’s very hydrophilic, and its weight varies a great deal more than its volume depending on how damp it is. A little water more or less in the cookie dough or pie filling doesn’t matter as much as more or less sugar.
But yes, making something like scones, weight is very easy, and lets me dirty fewer dishes.
Agreed, but you could add two (whatever the weight of cups is) of broth. In my kitchen, this makes sense as I make a load of stock and freeze it in tubs, and the simplest way to portion it out is by putting the tubs on the scales and pouring it in. But weight=volume anyway: so I guess I’m using volume and weight at the same time! In other kitchens though, a measuring jug may be more readily to hand.
That much could be dismissed as a matter of preference; the real problem lies in things which can settle - a cup of flour could be 3/4 cup of flour if you bang it a few times - or big things which leave of unpredictable amounts of air space: how much carrot is a cup of carrot? How finely chopped is it? And looking at whole carrots, how do I know many I need to achieve that many cups?
Use weight and all that ceases to matter.
I’ve never cooked anything where it mattered if i used 50% or 200% of the amount of carrots in the recipe. I adjust all of those sorts of ingredients “to taste” anyway, often basing it on how many carrots I have, and when I next might use them. That is too say, my recipes generally say “one medium onion and two carrots” and I’ve never cared to measure more precisely than that. If you weigh your sliced carrots, what do you do with the rest of the carrots you’ve sliced, anyway? Throw them out?
I always “fluff” my flour before measuring, unless I am using a scale. That is, I store my flour in a sealed plastic bottle, and I turn it upside down and then right side up before sticking the measuring scoop in. This gives me very consistent results. If I’m using more than about a cup of flour, it’s easier to weigh it, but for smaller amounts, the measuring scoop is awfully simple.
Yeah, carrots was the first item to mind because I’m about to make a stew and I was checking how many I had! I won’t - you’re quite right - be measuring them. But recipes that ask for butter or shortening in tablespoons require one to mash butter into a tablespoon, which is more awkward then putting it on a set of scales. Or - as an exasperated Dutch friend living in Canada once told me - measuring broccoli or cilantro in cups is a pain!
I make a lot of bread, and bakers’ percentages allow ease of scaling up and down. If I need the water to be 60% of the weight of the flour - which is about standard - then 1000g of flour and 600g of water is very easy to scale up and down when making more or less. A wetter dough might be 65%, 70%, even 75%: all easy to play around with. But I concede, that’s more about sensibly interchangeable units than weight per se: it was never that easy when I was using imperial measurements!
I do almost everything by weight nowadays. If a recipe is in volume, it’s easy enough to convert in my head, especially since (as folks have pointed out) things like vegetables don’t really need precise measurements. Flour is 5 oz/140gr to a cup, sugar is 7oz/200 gr to a cup, butter is 1/2 ounce per tablespoon etc. etc.
I do still do spices and things like baking powder/soda by volume, since you have to pull out a spoon anyway, and it’s too easy to go over/under by a couple grams if doing by weight.
I thought flour was 4oz to a cup! I guess that’s the thing about density/settling/etc. I didn’t look up a standard conversion, I used an American cup measure and my scales, but I guess it needed tapping down a bit more. My American “biscuits” (quotes necessary when an Englishman calls those vaguely scone-like things biscuits) and cornbread nevertheless always turn out OK.
And yeah, baking powder, spices and whatnot generally happen in spoons. Though I have started weighing salt in my bread, as I’m using scales anyway.
Fair enough but when I make my own yogurt the volume doesn’t seem to change and I suspect that a straight mg/ml conversion is fine. When I strain it and make it greek-style the density may change a bit but to be honest, when it is that thick the error introduced by trying to get an accurate ml measurement is probably just as much an issue as treating it as a weight.
I’d pull out the scale to make bread. Large amounts of flour are probably the biggest win for using weight rather than volume.
But butter? My butter comes in sticks and the paper wrapper is marked in tablespoons. I just cut it to the right volume and drop the block in. No mashing, weighing, no container, even.
Broccoli? Cilantro? Do people try to measure these with any precision? I’d just chop broccoli until it looked like about the right volume. I hate cilantro, but I “measure” parsley by grabbing a bunch that looks like a good amount. Then i often cut it with scissors into the dish.
Oops, butter is marked by ounces. I don’t even know if that’s fluid ounces (volume) or weight. But I am measuring the pre-measured marked volume on the stick.
I use butter in 250g “pats” (bit like a stick but fatter and shorter) but a lot of people use some sort of fat from a tub. Pats do often have 50g graduations marked on the paper (as we all deal with butter in weight) but it’s not universal. And if it’s been dug into with a knife for somebody’s toast, they’re not strictly adhered to! So when I look at an American recipe and it’s got the butter in tablespoons, I need to know what a tablespoon of butter weighs, or to mash it into a tablespoon.
I guess the idea is that a good recipe ought to work for people who don’t know how to cook that well, so they don’t necessarily know what the right amount of carrots, broccoli, cilantro (or whatever) is. Or have the confidence to accept that it doesn’t matter. So if you’re going to specify, then specifying in terms which tune out that doubt for them would be useful, and weight can do that more reliably than volume. Specifying volume probably has more scope for confusing the inexperienced when the item in question doesn’t suit volumetric measure.
Well there you go, if it were melted butter would it now be oz or floz?
The whole volume/wet/dry/imperial USA/imperial UK seems unnecessarily complex to me. A gram is a gram everywhere, a ml is a gram. Metric is the clear winner for clarity and reproducability.
That’s baking of course and accuracy is needed. When I’m cooking I never weigh anything, it is all by sight, taste and feel.
American recipes all have butter on ounces or pounds, because that’s how sticks of butter are universally marked in the US. I’ve never seen a recipe calling for tablespoons of butter. And you measure it before you melt it, of course.
Yeah, if you are using cooking fat from a tub, I guess weighing would be easier. I suppose you’d put a bit of wax paper or something over the scale, and then spoon fat onto the paper until you hit the right weight?
As for recipes for novices, I think volume of veggies is easier. You can eyeball that pile of chopped carrots and think, “that looks like about a cup”, and so long as the recipe doesn’t lead you to believe that the precise volume matters, you’ll do fine. It’s much harder to eyeball veggies and guess their weight. I imagine a novice could be off by a factor of 5, whereas they’d probably get the volume to within a factor of 2, which should be good enough for most recipes.
If you actually measure all your veggies precisely, you are working far too hard, and cooking will be a chore. Any recipe that suggests you should do so is really doing you a disservice.
no, I guess it is tablespoons. Anyway, American butter is about the easiest thing in the world to measure, which is why I don’t even remember how I do it.
The first time I ever made an apple pie, I saw that it called for so many cups of sliced apples, and assumed that it meant that the apples themselves should have that volume. I didn’t feel like measuring the water displacement, so I assumed that they were slightly less dense than water, weighed the apples when I bought them in the supermarket, and made a mental note of how many apples made up that volume.
Of course, I ended up with much more apples than would fit in a pie, a dilemma I resolved by making two apple pies.
I’ve seen both 4 and 5 ounces per cup of flour in various conversion guides. Google it; you’ll see. Most recipes work if you’re somewhere in the range - I guess that’s not surprising given how volume measurements of flour can be vastly different depending on how you measure, the humidity, the exact type of flour, and the phase of the moon.
I guess it’s easy to forget that baking is an ancient, ancient part of our culture. Ingrained into what makes us human, really. Breaking bread, this bread is my body, give us this day our daily bread, bread of life, bread and water, etc, etc.
I measure apples for pie by volume. As i cut them, I toss the cut pieces into the empty pie plate. When the pie plate in comfortably overflowing, I stop cutting up apples.
