Units of Measurement

Revision as of 09:33, 5 November 2022

The units of measure I use in recipes on this website might be unfamiliar to you. This is because you (like me) grew up with an utterly bizarre mish-mash of weights designed to measure sheep's wool in the middle ages, dry volume measurements based on Edward III's definition of a bushel, and the sizes of the spoons found in the apron of one specific cooking school instructor in 1896.

Outside of a very small number of recipes that can be reduced to simple volume ratios, such as cooking rice in water, these measurements are more of a hindrance than a help to the average home cook. Ever wondered what firmly packed, lightly packed, leveled, rounded, heaped, or sifted meant in a recipe? It meant that measuring was hopelessly inexact and basically impossible and you should just wing it. Volume measures are inherently inaccurate. Those modifiers can change the amount of an ingredient in a recipe by a third or more. That's a really error prone and dumb way to cook. I am convinced that our unthinking adherence to volume-based measurements is responsible for quite a bit of why so many Americans think cooking is difficult.

Instead, cooking should be done by mass. That is, by weight. Weight-based recipes need no ridiculous modifiers to try (and fail) to account for different densities of an ingredient from batch to batch, manufacturer to manufacturer, or location to location. It does not matter one bit which flour you use in North Carolina or which one I use in Asturias. 100 grams of flour is 100 grams of flour. There is precision, and more importantly, confidence.

And no, those automatic US to Metric converters that some recipe blogs have are not useful. You cannot simply convert volume to mass because each manufacturer or batch of ingredient will have a slightly different density.

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 Outside of a very small number of recipes that can be reduced to simple volume ratios, such as cooking rice in water, these measurements are more of a hindrance than a help to the average home cook. Ever wondered what ''firmly packed'', ''lightly packed'', ''leveled'', ''rounded'', ''heaped'', or ''sifted'' meant in a recipe? It meant that measuring was hopelessly inexact and basically impossible and you should just wing it. Volume measures are inherently inaccurate. Those modifiers can change the amount of an ingredient in a recipe by a third or more. That's a really error prone and dumb way to cook. I am convinced that our unthinking adherence to volume-based measurements is responsible for quite a bit of why so many Americans think cooking is difficult.
-Instead, cooking should be done by mass. That is, by weight. Weight-based recipes need no ridiculous modifiers to try (and fail) to account for different densities of an ingredient from batch to batch, manufacturer to manufacturer, or location to location. It does not matter one bit which flour you use in North Carolina or which one I sue in [[Asturias]]. 100 grams of flour is 100 grams of flour. There is precision, and more importantly, confidence.
+Instead, cooking should be done by mass. That is, by weight. Weight-based recipes need no ridiculous modifiers to try (and fail) to account for different densities of an ingredient from batch to batch, manufacturer to manufacturer, or location to location. It does not matter one bit which flour you use in North Carolina or which one I use in [[Asturias]]. 100 grams of flour is 100 grams of flour. There is precision, and more importantly, confidence.
+And no, those automatic US to Metric converters that some recipe blogs have are not useful. You cannot simply convert volume to mass because each manufacturer or batch of ingredient will have a slightly different density.
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