Dry ingredients by weight isn’t a metric exclusive thing, it’s an “accurate recipe” thing. Plenty of American recipes call for ounces and pounds. Cups are also a unit of volume, so 1c of milk occupies the same volume as 1c of water even though their masses are different (at a given temperature; which is why it’s better to use weight for liquid ingredients as well)
The confusion is when you have no idea whether they are calling for 28.4ml, 29.5ml or 28.3g when they say “ounce”
What’s confusing about it? It’s the amount of flour that fills a 236ml cup. It’s no different than measuring 1L of water
You may say “yeah well it depends on how finely ground the flour is or how tightly packed the broccoli is” and the answer is “it either doesn’t matter or it’s a bad recipe”
Sure, so then you do it by weight and I have to ask if your measuring the flours weight in Florida or Arizona and what time of year it is to figure out how much humidity is in it.
Food should never require that amount of accuracy. It’s a bloody cake, how much flour and water do you need, about that much. Eggs? A few lol, only have 2 fuck it that’s fine
There is a best practice of spooning flour into the measuring cup to avoid dense packing but in my experience most people just scoop and go even though it introduces variability. Usually it won’t matter too much or you’ll see things like, “If the dough seems dry add more water a tablespoon at a time.” included in the recipe. Of course even with weight you sometimes see that sort of instruction because the moisture content of flour varies.
I get why that’d be a bit annoying particularly if you aren’t experienced with the type of dish.
If it’s a recipe that it matters in then the standard is to not pack the flour and to level the top of the cup, otherwise (like broccoli) its being used as a helpful guestimate for an items total, not a necessary and essential measurement
There are plenty of things to be confused about, but it is baffling to me that this should be one of them.
A cup measure is a unit of volume.
I get it if you are not familiar with that unit of measurement, but to be confused about using volume as a unit of measurement… it is not exactly rocket surgery.
Seems like you are just looking for a reason to be annoyed.
Legit, if that’s confusing to you, maybe take a step back and take a formal cooking class.
It doesn’t matter what system you use, a unit of volume is a unit of volume. Doesn’t matter what’s in it, it’s in a container that holds that volume of any given thing. If that thing is all air or water, or other liquids, the thing being measured will have less gaps in that volume, but that’s irrelevant because recipes using units of volume take that into account.
If a recipe calls for a litre of flour, would you still be confused?
Now, if you’re just objecting to volume measures instead of weight, that’s a different issue as well, but equally irrelevant because the recipe will still be calibrated for that weight, so if you don’t have a scale, you’re equally screwed.
People seem to forget that it’s a fairly recent thing to have any accurate measures in recipes at all. And even more recent that a home cook is going to have access to accurate scales. It’s one of the things food historians have to deal with. You go back past the 1900s and good luck finding anything standardized at all. I used to have my grandmother’s collection of measuring spoons that had accumulated in her family. Even the ones from the result early 1900s weren’t exactly identical in volume when tested against each other
The recipe books from England during that era weren’t better than US ones. Nor were the French recipes.
Measuring by volume came well before weights in cookbooks across all Europe and the americas.
So, if that’s actually confusing for you, that cups/liters/whatever is a container full of the ingredient, you must be a very new cook indeed. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very simple concept
If a recipe calls for a litre of flour, would you still be confused?
To be honest, yes, that would be weird to a European. Flour is usually measured in weight and not volume. Volume is usually used for liquids only over here. And volume is not very helpful for another reason: if I need 12 cups of flour, how many bags of flour do I need to buy? They are sold per kg here. Do they sell flour by volume in the US?
You’re in Europe. If you’re cooking an American or British recipe, you’ll have to convert things. Same as you would if you were cooking a recipe that’s using other measures, though since those aren’t likely to be in European languages at all, unless they’re much older, I can’t imagine the average person trying to.
Volume is plenty helpful, as I said, because you don’t really need anything complicated to use it. A vessel with lines on it is about as simple as it gets. Hell, most recipes issuing volume measures don’t even need precise measures at all, there’s a ton of wiggle room in them.
I’m kinda weirded out that you skipped all the parts about how and why various forms of measure moved into recipes and basically repeated the same complaint, tbh.
A lot of recipes would benefit from being moved to weight rather than volume. And that’s regardless of what units are involved. But, they then become something one tier more complicated. A pound of potatoes is more precise than two medium potatoes. But precision doesn’t matter with potatoes because you aren’t going to waste half a potato to get exactly one pound.
Flour isn’t any different until you get into baking, and even then the degree of precision needed isn’t what you’d need in a chemistry lab. You can do all kinds of baking just by eyeball; using volume is just more precise, and weight another step more precise.
That’s why it doesn’t matter than flour is sold by the pound and used by volume or grams. You buy bags of flour and store them so that you have them ready. It’s a staple food. If you need to have an unusually large amount by volume, you’re going to go buy another bag, or two, or three.
If the recipe uses grams, you use a scale that has gram units. If it’s by ounces, that’s what you use. If the recipe calls for deciliters, or milliliters, the same just as it would be by cup. Conversions are just part of cooking. It always has been.
Maybe, if you can get every country in the world to start translating their recipes into a standardized recipe language, you could eventually get to where conversion isn’t part of it. But it wouldn’t be as simple as just doing everything by weight. There’s too many ingredients like potatoes or eggs where the unit is the item itself. The waste involved would be absurd.
Seriously, it isn’t rocket science, it isn’t a chem lab. Grab a conversion chart, have some fun.
Never really reflected on it, but plenty of swedish recipes measure things like flour in deciliters (sometimes with gram equivalents with things like bread). Don’t know if it’s us being silly, or if it’s common elsewhere…
You might be right, I think I got annoyed with fluid ounces in cups in a recipe with flour also measured in cups, and some other random third measurement.
Cups are ~235ml regardless of wet or dry. They are one of the sane-er measurements
You may be confusing your frustration with the ounce, which may refer to:
In metric, dry ingredients are measured by weight, so how much a cup is changes for each ingredient.
Dry ingredients by weight isn’t a metric exclusive thing, it’s an “accurate recipe” thing. Plenty of American recipes call for ounces and pounds. Cups are also a unit of volume, so 1c of milk occupies the same volume as 1c of water even though their masses are different (at a given temperature; which is why it’s better to use weight for liquid ingredients as well)
The confusion is when you have no idea whether they are calling for 28.4ml, 29.5ml or 28.3g when they say “ounce”
No, I’m also confused by “a cup of flower” or even “a cup of broccoli” in American recipes.
What’s confusing about it? It’s the amount of flour that fills a 236ml cup. It’s no different than measuring 1L of water
You may say “yeah well it depends on how finely ground the flour is or how tightly packed the broccoli is” and the answer is “it either doesn’t matter or it’s a bad recipe”
Not confusing, just crappy.
Volume for a powder is bad because they can “fluff up” when poured reducing the amount being added, so proportions are wrong.
Liquids don’t hold air like flour does.
Sure, so then you do it by weight and I have to ask if your measuring the flours weight in Florida or Arizona and what time of year it is to figure out how much humidity is in it.
Food should never require that amount of accuracy. It’s a bloody cake, how much flour and water do you need, about that much. Eggs? A few lol, only have 2 fuck it that’s fine
That can vary wildly based on how compact the flour is.
There is a best practice of spooning flour into the measuring cup to avoid dense packing but in my experience most people just scoop and go even though it introduces variability. Usually it won’t matter too much or you’ll see things like, “If the dough seems dry add more water a tablespoon at a time.” included in the recipe. Of course even with weight you sometimes see that sort of instruction because the moisture content of flour varies.
I get why that’d be a bit annoying particularly if you aren’t experienced with the type of dish.
It DOES matter and that’s why you need to be very clear on how you properly measure when you use volumetric measures for powders.
Most serioys US bakers use metric eg a stick of butter is 113g of butter.
If it’s a recipe that it matters in then the standard is to not pack the flour and to level the top of the cup, otherwise (like broccoli) its being used as a helpful guestimate for an items total, not a necessary and essential measurement
There are plenty of things to be confused about, but it is baffling to me that this should be one of them.
A cup measure is a unit of volume.
I get it if you are not familiar with that unit of measurement, but to be confused about using volume as a unit of measurement… it is not exactly rocket surgery.
Seems like you are just looking for a reason to be annoyed.
Legit, if that’s confusing to you, maybe take a step back and take a formal cooking class.
It doesn’t matter what system you use, a unit of volume is a unit of volume. Doesn’t matter what’s in it, it’s in a container that holds that volume of any given thing. If that thing is all air or water, or other liquids, the thing being measured will have less gaps in that volume, but that’s irrelevant because recipes using units of volume take that into account.
If a recipe calls for a litre of flour, would you still be confused?
Now, if you’re just objecting to volume measures instead of weight, that’s a different issue as well, but equally irrelevant because the recipe will still be calibrated for that weight, so if you don’t have a scale, you’re equally screwed.
People seem to forget that it’s a fairly recent thing to have any accurate measures in recipes at all. And even more recent that a home cook is going to have access to accurate scales. It’s one of the things food historians have to deal with. You go back past the 1900s and good luck finding anything standardized at all. I used to have my grandmother’s collection of measuring spoons that had accumulated in her family. Even the ones from the result early 1900s weren’t exactly identical in volume when tested against each other
The recipe books from England during that era weren’t better than US ones. Nor were the French recipes.
Measuring by volume came well before weights in cookbooks across all Europe and the americas.
So, if that’s actually confusing for you, that cups/liters/whatever is a container full of the ingredient, you must be a very new cook indeed. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a very simple concept
To be honest, yes, that would be weird to a European. Flour is usually measured in weight and not volume. Volume is usually used for liquids only over here. And volume is not very helpful for another reason: if I need 12 cups of flour, how many bags of flour do I need to buy? They are sold per kg here. Do they sell flour by volume in the US?
You’re in Europe. If you’re cooking an American or British recipe, you’ll have to convert things. Same as you would if you were cooking a recipe that’s using other measures, though since those aren’t likely to be in European languages at all, unless they’re much older, I can’t imagine the average person trying to.
Volume is plenty helpful, as I said, because you don’t really need anything complicated to use it. A vessel with lines on it is about as simple as it gets. Hell, most recipes issuing volume measures don’t even need precise measures at all, there’s a ton of wiggle room in them.
I’m kinda weirded out that you skipped all the parts about how and why various forms of measure moved into recipes and basically repeated the same complaint, tbh.
A lot of recipes would benefit from being moved to weight rather than volume. And that’s regardless of what units are involved. But, they then become something one tier more complicated. A pound of potatoes is more precise than two medium potatoes. But precision doesn’t matter with potatoes because you aren’t going to waste half a potato to get exactly one pound.
Flour isn’t any different until you get into baking, and even then the degree of precision needed isn’t what you’d need in a chemistry lab. You can do all kinds of baking just by eyeball; using volume is just more precise, and weight another step more precise.
That’s why it doesn’t matter than flour is sold by the pound and used by volume or grams. You buy bags of flour and store them so that you have them ready. It’s a staple food. If you need to have an unusually large amount by volume, you’re going to go buy another bag, or two, or three.
If the recipe uses grams, you use a scale that has gram units. If it’s by ounces, that’s what you use. If the recipe calls for deciliters, or milliliters, the same just as it would be by cup. Conversions are just part of cooking. It always has been.
Maybe, if you can get every country in the world to start translating their recipes into a standardized recipe language, you could eventually get to where conversion isn’t part of it. But it wouldn’t be as simple as just doing everything by weight. There’s too many ingredients like potatoes or eggs where the unit is the item itself. The waste involved would be absurd.
Seriously, it isn’t rocket science, it isn’t a chem lab. Grab a conversion chart, have some fun.
Tl;dr
Tl;dr is read the fucking comment, your poor attention span that can’t manage what would be a half sheet of paper is not my problem
Never really reflected on it, but plenty of swedish recipes measure things like flour in deciliters (sometimes with gram equivalents with things like bread). Don’t know if it’s us being silly, or if it’s common elsewhere…
You might be right, I think I got annoyed with fluid ounces in cups in a recipe with flour also measured in cups, and some other random third measurement.
Also an ounce of common sense!