The whole point of cups is that you can buy an ingredient by the gallon and it’s very likely that you can double or halve the recipe to your heart’s content and eventually use up the entire package with no waste.
Well then you’ve lost the whole advantage of base 10. You’re buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you’re doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it’s all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that’s 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.
I have 1l milk and 1kg flour. My recipe wants ⅜ liter milk and 150g flour. 375ml is a bit odd but trivial ultimately, and very easy to measure when I just pour 375g into my blender on a scale.
Now how would imperial cups deal with 150g from 1kg?
I also have 45g oil, what odd measurements would that give when you try to divide it up without a single decimal number?
Try 24g suggar.
Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We’ve got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn’t been touched in a while.
The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you’re talking about, it’d be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).
it wouldn’t though, it would be like 7.5 parts milk to 3 parts flour to almost a part oil to half a part sugar.
And that still being quite imprecise, using 22g or 26g sugar makes a change in taste I wouldn’t want to happen uncontrolled at random. I’m also closer to 41g oil these days, wouldn’t want to use 50 to make it fit some very coarse division.
Scoops of stuff also seems very imprecise. Are they at least levelled?
I also use “a pinch of salt”, which doesn’t have to be very precise, but if someone were to ask I could tell them “roughly 0.2g”, from having just measured it. I still remembr how much I hated descriptions like “a pinch” as a cooking novice, and now I can simply measure my pinch on a scale and others can confirm their pinch on their scale until it about matches 0.2g too. How would that work in imperial?
A little more than 4.5 liters. Except a certain nearby country uses a little less than 3.8 liters as their gallon, so we get all sorts of “smaller than a gallon” packages labeled as a gallon, leading to people getting ripped off if they don’t realize they’re being sold something less than a gallon as if it were a full gallon.
In other words, the gallon is the original shrinkflation unit of measure.
A useful size to package and sell ingredients in, such that the person following a recipe can halve or double the recipe as needed and still use the entire package with no waste.
Would it help if I told you that it was defined as the volume contained in a cube whose length is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/166219513th of a second? I imagine it wouldn’t. Obviously the litre is superior, it’s a much less arbitrary cube defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/2997924580 seconds.
Where I’m from, flour is sold as packages of 1kg, which they say is 1000g (way too much in my humble opinion) , which cannot be easily divided with simple maths when I want to halve or double my recipe. Recipe specify flour in grams, which makes it so very complicated when I need to convert it to ngogn, in the end I’m always left with flour in my package when I want to double the size of my cakes, which wouldn’t happen if the package size was sold in cubic potrzebies.
You guys have to weigh your flour? We just grab a cup and scoop it and then dump it in the bowl. You’re busting out the scale? You’re not exactly selling me on metric here.
But having industrial quantities is like most of the argument for using metric! You mean to tell me you’re not converting between kL and mL all the time and reaping the benefits of being able to just slide the decimal over? That’s a shame. I’m not sure that doing your everyday cooking in increments of 125g is all that useful then. The cup is sounding better and better.
By industrial quantities I mean we don’t have a massive sack of flour we can just dip a mug into, or several quarts (wtf) of high fructose corn syrup lying around.
Plus our cups vary in size from best china tea cup, to sports direct mug.
You know where are with 500g of flour and 350mls of water.
What I do is my scale is underneath my bowl, every time I need to add a quantity of an ingredient I reset it to zero with what’s in it.
Though I get that filling a cup and dumping it in seems very practical at first glance, what happen when you need 3/4 of a cup ? Or 1.5 cup ? Do you have 20 cup in the kitchen of different sizes, then you need to grab the one of the correct size which isn’t more practical than having a scale which can do infinite granularity, also I expect you would take the wrong cup on many occasions and get the wrong quantity
We have the same measuring cups I’m sure you use for liquids. They have mL on one side, cups on the other and a scale for sub-sizes. We do have individually-sized scoops which are nice for over-scooping and just sliding your finger across the top to push off the excess and get the amount you need. It’s not strictly necessary though. They come in a set where each smaller scoop fits inside the larger ones in a tight stack that can sit in a drawer.
The infinite granularity is ultimately unnecessary. Recipes don’t call for 0.397 cups. I’m sure you don’t see any that ask for 438 grams. If you do the math on a lot of recipes listed in both metric and imperial, you’ll find that they’re not even using the exact same amounts. The convenience of using standard measures tends to outweigh the flavor difference with plus or minus a percent of ingredient.
There’s nothing inherently more natural about cooking in the metric system, people just prefer base 10 these days. People balk at 4 quarts to an arbitrary gallon but love 1 liter being the arbitrary cubic volume of 10 ten-millionths of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole passing through Paris [but not quite].
Cooking by volume was natural before everyone had accurate kitchen scales. You didn’t have a digital tare button in the 1800s but you did have a bunch of containers in common sizes.
what happen when you need 3/4 of a cup ? Or 1.5 cup ?
Generally you have 4 sizes: 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. You just use a combination of 2 sizes (1+1/2) or multiples of your smallest size (3x1/4).
You usually don’t need high precision for cooking, common ratios are good approximations (1:1, 1:2, 1:8, etc…). Baking is a different beast and I don’t know how people did it before weight.
Also, fuck tablespoons and teaspoons. They should just be replaced with 1/16 cup and 1/32 cup.
Still a more acceptable measurement than “1 cup”.
The whole point of cups is that you can buy an ingredient by the gallon and it’s very likely that you can double or halve the recipe to your heart’s content and eventually use up the entire package with no waste.
Yeah, because no other metric can be divided by an other size of the same metric.
That is why I always have 100ml over whenever I divide a liter by 250ml increments.
Well then you’ve lost the whole advantage of base 10. You’re buying 2L or 4L containers and dividing them up into 250ml increments, having to do divisions of 8 or 16 like some common imperial peasant, only you’re doing it with numbers that have no real relationship with your daily life. I mean, ultimately it’s all arbitrary anyway. But when someone says use 2 cups, that’s 2 scoops, which seems better to me than having to know that 500ml is 2 scoops.
I have 1l milk and 1kg flour. My recipe wants ⅜ liter milk and 150g flour. 375ml is a bit odd but trivial ultimately, and very easy to measure when I just pour 375g into my blender on a scale.
Now how would imperial cups deal with 150g from 1kg?
I also have 45g oil, what odd measurements would that give when you try to divide it up without a single decimal number?
Try 24g suggar.
I’d love to see all that converted to imperial.
Our recipes rarely use weights except for maybe meats. We’ve got a scale in my kitchen but it hasn’t been touched in a while.
The ratios of ingredients matter more than the exact values so for the recipe you’re talking about, it’d be like 2 cups of milk, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup of oil, 1/8 cup of sugar (or 2 tablespoons, which is a pretty common size so most people probably have a scoop for that).
it wouldn’t though, it would be like 7.5 parts milk to 3 parts flour to almost a part oil to half a part sugar.
And that still being quite imprecise, using 22g or 26g sugar makes a change in taste I wouldn’t want to happen uncontrolled at random. I’m also closer to 41g oil these days, wouldn’t want to use 50 to make it fit some very coarse division.
Scoops of stuff also seems very imprecise. Are they at least levelled?
I also use “a pinch of salt”, which doesn’t have to be very precise, but if someone were to ask I could tell them “roughly 0.2g”, from having just measured it. I still remembr how much I hated descriptions like “a pinch” as a cooking novice, and now I can simply measure my pinch on a scale and others can confirm their pinch on their scale until it about matches 0.2g too. How would that work in imperial?
*galleon
What’s a gallon?
A pirate ship, I think.
An old, old wooden ship.
A little more than 4.5 liters. Except a certain nearby country uses a little less than 3.8 liters as their gallon, so we get all sorts of “smaller than a gallon” packages labeled as a gallon, leading to people getting ripped off if they don’t realize they’re being sold something less than a gallon as if it were a full gallon.
In other words, the gallon is the original shrinkflation unit of measure.
Something that can be divided by cups I believe
A useful size to package and sell ingredients in, such that the person following a recipe can halve or double the recipe as needed and still use the entire package with no waste.
Would it help if I told you that it was defined as the volume contained in a cube whose length is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/166219513th of a second? I imagine it wouldn’t. Obviously the litre is superior, it’s a much less arbitrary cube defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/2997924580 seconds.
But no one weighs flour in litres.
This guy does.
Where I’m from, flour is sold as packages of 1kg, which they say is 1000g (way too much in my humble opinion) , which cannot be easily divided with simple maths when I want to halve or double my recipe. Recipe specify flour in grams, which makes it so very complicated when I need to convert it to ngogn, in the end I’m always left with flour in my package when I want to double the size of my cakes, which wouldn’t happen if the package size was sold in cubic potrzebies.
this guy knuths how units work
You guys have to weigh your flour? We just grab a cup and scoop it and then dump it in the bowl. You’re busting out the scale? You’re not exactly selling me on metric here.
What can I say, other than we don’t have industrial quantities of ingredients in our houses, and we like accuracy in our recipes.
But having industrial quantities is like most of the argument for using metric! You mean to tell me you’re not converting between kL and mL all the time and reaping the benefits of being able to just slide the decimal over? That’s a shame. I’m not sure that doing your everyday cooking in increments of 125g is all that useful then. The cup is sounding better and better.
l is lowercase, an kl is not used. A kl is a m³, which water utilities charge by, and pools and interior volume are measured in.
By industrial quantities I mean we don’t have a massive sack of flour we can just dip a mug into, or several quarts (wtf) of high fructose corn syrup lying around.
Plus our cups vary in size from best china tea cup, to sports direct mug.
You know where are with 500g of flour and 350mls of water.
What I do is my scale is underneath my bowl, every time I need to add a quantity of an ingredient I reset it to zero with what’s in it.
Though I get that filling a cup and dumping it in seems very practical at first glance, what happen when you need 3/4 of a cup ? Or 1.5 cup ? Do you have 20 cup in the kitchen of different sizes, then you need to grab the one of the correct size which isn’t more practical than having a scale which can do infinite granularity, also I expect you would take the wrong cup on many occasions and get the wrong quantity
We have the same measuring cups I’m sure you use for liquids. They have mL on one side, cups on the other and a scale for sub-sizes. We do have individually-sized scoops which are nice for over-scooping and just sliding your finger across the top to push off the excess and get the amount you need. It’s not strictly necessary though. They come in a set where each smaller scoop fits inside the larger ones in a tight stack that can sit in a drawer.
The infinite granularity is ultimately unnecessary. Recipes don’t call for 0.397 cups. I’m sure you don’t see any that ask for 438 grams. If you do the math on a lot of recipes listed in both metric and imperial, you’ll find that they’re not even using the exact same amounts. The convenience of using standard measures tends to outweigh the flavor difference with plus or minus a percent of ingredient.
There’s nothing inherently more natural about cooking in the metric system, people just prefer base 10 these days. People balk at 4 quarts to an arbitrary gallon but love 1 liter being the arbitrary cubic volume of 10 ten-millionths of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole passing through Paris [but not quite].
Cooking by volume was natural before everyone had accurate kitchen scales. You didn’t have a digital tare button in the 1800s but you did have a bunch of containers in common sizes.
Generally you have 4 sizes: 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. You just use a combination of 2 sizes (1+1/2) or multiples of your smallest size (3x1/4).
You usually don’t need high precision for cooking, common ratios are good approximations (1:1, 1:2, 1:8, etc…). Baking is a different beast and I don’t know how people did it before weight.
Also, fuck tablespoons and teaspoons. They should just be replaced with 1/16 cup and 1/32 cup.
To say you’re not taking this seriously would be an understatement. A teaspoon is not half a tablespoon.