" … The stuff I buy at the
store claims to be pre-sifted, but I can tell that it’s denser before I sift it than after, so the measurements would be off."
Hello??? I don’t know what kind of scales you use in Texas, but they must be pretty fancy if they can differentiate on the basis of the density of the ingredients! I would venture that 1kg of flour would still weigh 1kg even after you’d sifted it (unless you’re incedibly clumsy and spilt most of it )
At the risk of proposing a semi-sensible answer, I thought it was to do with getting more air into your ingredients/mixture which helps it rise during baking. Anyway, the answers from the SDStaff make for amusing reading …
[[At the risk of proposing a semi-sensible answer, I thought it was to do with getting more airinto your ingredients/mixture which helps it rise during baking. Anyway, the answers from the SDStaff make for amusing reading …]] Mark Taylor
I don’t like your tone, young man. No cupcakes for you!
Jill
Exactly, it makes it very important, which is why using something like mass to measure out solid ingredients would be much more … logical??
So, do you get receipes which ask for “1 cup of lard” for instance? If so, what do you do? - melt the lard so it fills the shape of the cup and then put it in the fridge again to solidify before adding it?
Mark Taylor asks:
<<So, do you get receipes which ask for “1 cup of lard” for instance? If so, what do you do? - melt the lard so it fills the shape of the cup and then put it in the fridge again to solidify before adding it?>>
I am not personally a user of lard (not kosher, dontcha know), but I do use recipes calling for solid shortening (vegetable) or butter by the cup (or fraction thereof).
For butter, it’s generally pretty easy. Almost all butter in the US is sold in standard sticks of 1/2 cup (weighing a bit more than 100g). The sticks are wrapped in paper with volume markings on it, which you simply cut through with a knife. Voila, instant volume measure. I think lard is typically packed in a similar way.
For solid vegetable shortening, which is actually quite soft, you just kind of spackle it into a measuring cup (the kind of dry measure that you fill to the top and level with a knife or spatula). Then you scrape it out of the cup with a rubber spatula or similar utensil.
[[So, do you get receipes which ask for “1 cup of lard” for instance? If so, what do you do?]]
For starters, I would look for a different recipe! There is a handy way to measure shortening (same consistency as lard) that makes clean-up easier too. If a recipe calls for 1/2 cup of shortening (or butter - not quite as gross as lard, I put water in the two-cup glass measuring cup up to the 1 1/2 cup line, then add spoonfuls of shortening until the water reaches the 2 cup line. Then dip out the shortening into the other ingredients. Makes one cake big enough for pieces for everyone except Mark Taylor.
Jill
Ahem, thank you all for your thoughtful answers and comments and advice on measuring out butter and shortening etc …
I feel I have to confess that my choice of “lard” as an example was less because of a genuine desire to find out to measure out lard and more because I thought it a (dare I say) “humourous” example? (You know, perceived incongruity and all that?) – Jill is quite right that a recipe asking for lard would probably prompt you to look for an alternative!
Anyway, the point I was trying to highlight was the slightly odd “custom” of using volume measurements to measure out solids in recipes in the US - Jill’s example highlights why this is so odd:
Maybe I am just lazy, but doesn’t this seem a rather extensive procedure to go through? - wouldn’t it just be easier to weigh out a certain amount on a set of scales??
This is an interesting method that I will definitely try next time I bake.
One question: does the shortening float? If so, then what you are actually doing here is measuring an amount of shortening that weighs as much as 1/2 cup of water. By Archimedes’ Principle, floating objects displace their weight of fluid. Objects that sink displace their volume. So, assuming the shortening floats, the volume you measure is actually a little more than 1/2 cup. The difference is probably trivial, but it’s these kind of nitpicks that make life entertaining for us nitpickers (and annoy everyone else).
What kind of cook worth their weight in salt (thats for Mark) actually precisely measures the ingredients. A rough measure is adaquate, especially considering the inconsistancy of ingredients, and moisture in the air, etc. vary so widely a precise measure is redundant. Most cooks, just wing it, and go by look and feel. Most recipes that call for flour, which started this absurdity, are breads and pasta that you knead and/or roll out. Typically you flour your hands and board frequently and therefore destroy all that time and effort you put into precision.
The facts expressed here belong to everybody, the opinions to me. The distinction is
yours to draw…
Unfortunately, there are a great many paranoid morons in the US, and as far as they’re concerned:
using scales in the kitchen is part of the Metric System, and
the Metric System was invented by Communists.
Since public policy in the US is generally under the threat of veto by said paranoid morons, we continue to use volume measure, in a complex and inconsistent system. (Many volume measures differ depending on what is being measured.) Intelligent cooks will use scales where possible, of course, but nearly all US cookbooks and package instructions fail to list weights, lest they be seen as part of the unAmerican atheist-red-jew-banker Metric conspiracy.
John W. Kennedy
“Conpact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Here it comes! My knee jerk response to all you Yank-bashers out there.
John- Your profile says Chatham, so I’m guessing you’re English. Just because we don’t do things the same way you or even the rest of the World does, does not make us morons. (I won’t even comment on your offensive remarks about Americans believing in an athiest-Jew-banker…whatever conspiracy.)
We don’t use the metric system for most things for the simple reason that the old way works just fine. ('Taint broken, don’t fix it!) I won’t call you names for driving on the left side of the road if you don’t call me names for measuring my flour any damn way I please.
[[Anyway, the point I was trying to highlight was the slightly odd “custom” of using volume measurements to measure out solids in recipes in the US]]
Maybe it’s odd but food seems to turn out just fine most of the time with our odd measuring techniques. Let’s see a show of hands. How many people here prefer American cooking over British cooking? You can even take that poll in England. Although I wonder if Chinese or Indian people measure their ingredients very carefully at all… and in my opinion their foods are best of all.
Regarding lard, it’s true I balk at cooking with it, but I often wonder if the reason food tastes better in Mexican restaurants than at my house is because of all the lard used. I just don’t wanna know about it.
Yes, lard/shortening/butter floats in water, but I hadn’t thought about the weight thing. I just thought it displaced space. You people sure know a lot of things.
Jill
My suspicion is that measuring ingredients is not inherently easier by mass than volume or the other way around. There are some ingredients which might be easier to weigh accurately than to put in a measuring cup accurately. But, if you consistantly use measuring cups you will get a feel for how high you want to stack the celery above the cup for a given recipe. (Granted this might depend as much on how much you LIKE celery as it does on how much space you think there is in the cup between celery pieces).
On the other hand, since I am a young american, measuring ingredients by mass would be darn near impossible, while measuring by volume is easy. (I have parts of several sets of measuring cups, but no scales whatsoever).
Regarding the lard measurement question: lard comes in sticks as well as in bulk. As to whether exact measurement matters: no in breads, more so in quick breads and cakes. For what it’s worth, whole wheat flour does not pack down as much as white and may be used after a quick stir.
The “profile” information seems unstable. Somehow, the “NJ” was lopped from “Chatham” – not that that’s any excuse for you failing to notice the word “we” in my posting.
For the rest, the present system is a mess. Literally years of “math” in elementary school are wasted in trying to teach the complex and nonsensical US system, when the metric system has to be learned anyway. Can you, right now, tell me the difference between a dry pint and a liquid pint? A Troy ounce and an Avoirdupois ounce? How many inches in a link? What is a slug? What is its relationship to a poundal?
As to whether or not there are paranoid right-wing lunatics who oppose the Metric system out of their crack-brained ideology, it takes only the skimming of any “letters to the Editor” column after an article on the subject to prove that.
As to the specific issue of cookery, any serious cook in any country will tell you to use a scale. You won’t find a major cookbook or cooking-school textbook in America that doesn’t deplore the popular aversion.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
John says: << Can you, right now, tell me the difference between a dry pint and a liquid pint? A Troy ounce and an Avoirdupois ounce? How many inches in a link? What is a slug? What is its relationship to a poundal? >>
While commonly used arguments, such are not effective. Most people never need to know these things, and probably haven’t ever heard of a “link” or a “slug” related to measurements. Hence, such as approach is easily shrugged off as irrelevant.
On the “not broken, needn’t be fixed” comment re adopting the metric system…That’s not the point. You probably get a new computer every few years, even though your old one isn’t broken. It’s called upgrading to a newer, better, more powerful system. Hey, my typewriter wasn’t broken, either, but I got a word processor BECAUSE IT’S EASIER AND BETTER AND MORE COMPATIBLE WITH WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING.
Sic etiam metric.
Upgrading my computer is a hell of a lot easier than upgrading the hundred or so cookbooks my wife and I own (She’s British BTW, and does just fine without a scale.) I talked to a friend who graduated from the California Culinary Academy, and he tells me that, yes, he does have a scale, but rarely uses it. A really good chef will usually rely more on his instinct than precise measures. The purpose of a scale in most restaurant kitchens is food cost control and in most cases is gaged in ounces and pounds.
Is it fair to call Americans culinary Luddites because we’re “too lazy” to recalibrate millions of receipes? I’m not going to apologize for my Grandmother’s use of measuring cups in her cookie receipes, neither am I going to go to the trouble of converting it to the metric system. Sorry, if I’m holding up the pace of human progress!
Oh, come on, the recipe conversion process is nothing. And you do it all the time. They repackage tomoto paste so you can’t buy the 4 oz can anymore, and you have to change the number of cans you toss in a recipe. Big freakin’ deal.
Instead, we have to pay more for car repairs because the service station needs both metric and imperial sized wrenches. We travel to foreign countries and they announce the weather as 20, and we don’t know if that’s cold or hot. I bought the wrong amount of lumber because someone converted the measurements from inches to yards and got it wrong.
Yeah, we’re too lazy to improve ourselves. That’s the spirit.
As an engineer who has spent what seems like a ridiculous amount of time converting units of various types into units of various other types and back, I have to agree that I would like it if the US switched to the metric system in manufacturing. However, considering the amount of equipment presently existing in factories that is not metric, I suspect that the next several generations of engineers will have to learn multiple systems of units. New plants will, I believe, slowly be built more and more with metric parts, because of the increasing globalization of industry.
However, I fail to see why that should have any impact on whether I cook with cups of flour or grams of flour.
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