I’m tired of guessing which country the author is from when they use cup measurement and how densely they put flour in it.
Use non-American recipes.
The rest of the world does this. And guess what, 1 milliliter of water is exactly 1 gram, unlike stupid ounces.
IMO anything sold by weight should be measured by weight in a recipe.
I could have an exception for things under 20g, which scales seem to get wrong a lot. I can do spoons, but not cups.
Also: Metric only. A tablespoon is anywhere from 13g to 20g depending on who you’re talking to. A gram is always a gram.
In the civilized world, they are. Except for liquids, but that’s a given.
This stupid “How many grams is a f-ing cup of <whatever> again?” is a pain in the a…
Highly recommend this book for baking for this and many reasons. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/250188/the-bread-bakers-apprentice-15th-anniversary-edition-by-peter-reinhart/
My personal favorite experience relating to this was buying some ice cream with nutritional information by the milliliter, but with serving size by the gram…
My kitchen scale won’t measure below one gram, and a lot of things (spices and flavorings, mostly) are used in amounts below one gram.
So I can either dirty up some spoons, or go buy a second scale that only gets used for the small stuff…
In general I agree, of course, but there definitely is a use case for volumetric measuring spoons.
i cant imagine this would be unpopular for anyone who actually bakes.
its so frustrating not having exact amounts for what is essentially chemistry.
I wanted to believe my opinion is popular yet recipes I’ve seen are almost in volume and I don’t know why.
Baking is chemistry for sure.
In my opinion every recipe should be in weight unless there’s a good reason to put it in volume. The idea of washing half a dozen individual little measuring cups to prepare one recipe is absurd. Slap a bowl on your scale and go to town.
My total guess is weighing scales used to be expensive / inaccessible for the common home baker and one of the first popular recipe books thus used volume, became wildly popular, and indirectly taught a generation of home bakers that baking recipes are by volume, not weight.
I can’t get my octogenarian mother to bake by weight, but she’s certainly not on Lemmy.
Flour’s ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season. Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.
I am quite literally a young scientist pursuing engineering PhD working on bakery products.
Sometimes baking is indeed an exact science :D
It’s just that the typical home baker has to guess and assume a lot of things.
Pretty sure any pastry chef will strongly disagree with that. If anything, baking is the cooking activity most akin to an exact science. The amounts need to be carefully measured, the temperatures need to be exactly right (e.g. Italian merengue), the baking time needs to be correct to the second for some dishes (lava cake).
Yes, the measures can change based on the flour or its substitutes (ground pistachio for example), but the processes involved require an equal amount of precision.
A lot of chefs call cooking an art, but baking a science.
If you know the factors that affect the flour, you can control said factors, thus predict your results based on such factors, more or less a measurable margin of error. Ergo, baking is precisely an exact science.
Baking is not an exact science
Yes, weight is more accurate when you have scales however if you are doing something on the fly or don’t have scales then volume gets you better results than trying to guess the weight.
My biggest problem with volume recipes is that very often they don’t abide to the 250ml cup but use slightly larger or smaller cups, which causes variations. There is also the caveat of not having a measuring cup available just as I previously mentioned not always having scales available.
With all that said, ideally recipes should include both weight and volume measurements at all times.
in baking mise en place is even more important than in cooking. On the fly baking is not adviced
All dry ingredients should for sure and they are where I am from. I still measure them in a special cup in the end that converts different ingredients from grams into volume but I wouldn’t know what to do with a “cup of flour” in the instructions either.
Same. Is the cups thing an american problem (again)?
It is. All recipes I have seen use weight. It wouldnt surprise me to see an american recipe use “2 bald eagle heads worth of sugar”.
It would take way more than two bald eagle heads to equal a cup, smh.
If it works why change it
It would be kind of annoying if you had do weigh all your liquids.
Also most liquids are water basically, so you can just convert it 1:1 to volume if you want to use a measuring cup.
As someone who actually weighs their liquids. it’s really not. Instead of pouring liquid into a measuring cup until it reaches how much ever you need, you put a cup/bowl on the scale, tare it, then still just pour in liquid until the scale reads how much ever you need.
If anything it’s easier because it’s more consistent. You can also re-tare and continue pouring more liquids or other ingredients into the same cup/bowl, cutting down on dishes.
The only annoying part is the first time you do it on a new recipe, where you have to do both measurements, so you can write down the mass for future reference.
Not really, not like the bowl has holes in it. Just pour it in until you hit the right amount like with everything else.
