Even for larger amounts, volume is sometimes used for food in metric units. Soda, beer, and wine are usually sold in mL or fractions of liters, not by weight.
Yeah, that can also be annoying. A pint (Imperial) is larger than 500mL of beer which itself is larger than a pint (American).
A 12 ounce soft drink is 354 mL. But there are 1/3 liter or 330mL (11.2 oz) versions in some places.
So, near equivalents, but the little differences can irk if you’re used to one but suddenly experience the other.
I’m not much of a cook myself, but as far as I can tell from a grew-up-metric perspective, people use non-metric rule-of-thumb quantities in such cases, such as a pinch or a “knife tip” for that. You’ll find that in lots of recipes. You’re never going to be in a situation where milligram precision is needed, and if you find that your dish is a bit too salty for your taste, you use a little less next time.
Thanks. I think that falls under
I have seen measuring vessels that have scales on them labelled in grams, with each scale indicating the quantity of a particular ingredient. For an example, see here (from German Amazon) - the scales read, from left to right, sugar, flour, raisins, and cubic centimetres/millilitres. The units for sugar, flour and raisins are grams, but of course what the vessel really measures is volume, and the scale is based on the usual density of these ingredients.
neat! thanks for sharing.
Even (relatively) cheap digital food scales display the weight to 10-milligram or even 1-milligram precision. How accurate they are is a good question, but if it mattered you could always check the calibration.
Really? 10 or 1 mg? I’ve never seen anything like that in a standard household set of scales. Or do you mean tenths of a gram, i.e., 100 mg? Those are very common indeed.
#1 on Amazon Best-Sellers was up to 5 kg, 1g increments, but #5 was this:
Amazing. Never seen anything like this at such a price for the general consumer.
But it has a maximum capacity of 100g, so you wouldn’t use it as your primary kitchen scale. The 5kg in 1g increments is much more generally useful.
My experience with baking is that the scale, and metric measures, are VERY useful, and generally superior to the US method of measuring cups. With the one exception of those very tiny amounts where measuring spoons just make it so easy. A teaspoon of cinnamon is much easier to manage than 4g of cinnamon, or whatever it is, since you have to get a spoon out anyway to gather the cinnamon and weigh it.
Just for the sake of comparison, here is a random example of a German (firmly metric) baking recipe, which uses units such as grams, packages (of pre-packaged ingredients), teaspoons (Teelöffel, TL) and pinches (Prise). Metric doesn’t necessarily mean metric in every single case.
This reminds me of a tattered recipe book my wife has that her mom had in the 1940s in Brazil. The recipes from time to time mention some random thing like “one small packet of …” with the assumption that housewives in 1940s Rio de Janeiro all had access to the official standard tiny package of whatever it is.
And measurements like that are totally lost to the mists of time.
I own this scale. It’s pretty nice. Good for measuring stuff like nutrients for small batch brewing/fermentation. It’s very easy to hit the upper limit, so it’s my tertiary scale if I need something very light and precise and the other two scales don’t cut it.
I … don’t? I haven’t measured a spice since I was a teenager first learning to cook.
But if I had to, I’d use metric measuring spoons and my milligram-resolution jeweller’s scale.
Metric is a gateway drug for adopting the SI unit system, which everybody should use in academia anyway.
But there is another system we may eventually adopt; the Planck unit system, with units of time, length and mass that are fundamental to the universe. Trouble is, these units are so fantastically small. Maybe our AI overlords will prefer them.
Everybody? In the Humanities it makes more sense to use the units of the time and place you’re looking at. I’m all for explaining the Roman pēs (foot) and stadium in metric, but it’s a lot easier to leave their original values than to worry about the details — especially since measurements varied in quantity and quality.
Oopsie
For baking, I’m on board with bakers’ percentages. Well, except for recipes involving eggs. It’s marvelous to get out the scale, throw in 300 grams of flour, then just know that I need 23=6g of yeast, 5.63=18g minus 1.2g = 16.8g of sugar, 3g salt and baking powder, and 150g of water. If I happen to want to use 400g of flour or 200g of flour, the head math is even simpler.
I’m all in on grams, but like I said (probably) 200 posts ago (probably) I’m still critical about attempts at metrification.
But who really measures small amounts of spices? They can never be exact, because you either have freshly ground coriander from your garden seeds, or the powdered stuff that’s been sitting in sunlight in the heat above your stove for the last four months. Using a specific measure without tasting is just absurd.