I’m tired of guessing which country the author is from when they use cup measurement and how densely they put flour in it.
i cant imagine this would be unpopular for anyone who actually bakes.
its so frustrating not having exact amounts for what is essentially chemistry.
It really doesn’t matter that much. When was the last time you had your kitchen scale calibrated? Are you actually putting in exactly 200g of flour? Or are you calling it good at anything between 190-210? I was a chemistry minor in college and no one was meticulously measuring out the eaxct amount or reagents they needed, they got it to the ball park and made sure to record exactly how much they used. You’re a home cook making a treat for your friends and family, not the royal pastry chef. And guess what? Those royal pastry chefs in the 18th century were also doing recipes by volume since precision scales weren’t readily available. Meanwhile i get frustrated when i run into a recipe that only uses weights because I’m not used to it. I already have incredibly limited counterspace, and find somewhere to set up my kitchen scale immediately throws me off my game.
As someone said elsewhere in this thread, you aren’t upset at volumetric measurements, you’re upset at American cultural hegemony.
bad practices become bad policies. minor issues scale terribly. its not crazy to want to do things appropriately.
as others have pointed out, scaling is far easier than washing handfuls of measuring devices. i can easily counter with your process sucks and takes more work just because you lack counterspace as opposed to dishwashing space.
just because you dont want to be exact doesnt mean others cant or shouldnt.
I’m getting high as fuck and baking treats for my friends and coworkers, not making something for a competition or dignitary. The process is irrelevant, what i was saying is that whatever you are comfortable with you should use. I can quickly scoop out 3 cups of flour and a cup and a half of sugar in the same time you can weigh them out. And at the end of the day no one will be able to tell the difference between our cookies. The temperature and humidity of your kitchen is going to have way more of an impact on your final product than a 2-5% variation in the quantity of ingredients.
If you are wondering why your cookies come out different every time you bake, it isn’t due to variance of temperature and humidity – IT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE USING WILDLY DIFFERENT AMOUNTS OF FLOUR.
And yes you ducking can tell the difference between a batch of cookies where the flour is weighed vs scooped.
You can’t accurately measure flour by volume. The amount you get in a scoop will vary depending on how compressed it is. You weigh flour to remove that variance, which can be far greater than 5%. Don’t believe me? Put a cup of flour in a measuring cup, then start pressing on it to pack it (you won’t have anywhere near a cup anymore). Controlling for flour density (ie: consistently measure by volume) is nearly impossible.
Brown sugar is similar but easier to manage (most recipes tell you to use packed measures instead of scooping).
Things like white sugar, sure – scoop away.
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.
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.
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.
A fluid ounce of water is an ounce of weight
Except that’s not true.
An imperial fluid ounce is 1⁄20 of an imperial pint, 1⁄160 of an imperial gallon or exactly 28.4130625 mL.
A US customary fluid ounce is 1⁄16 of a US liquid pint and 1⁄128 of a US liquid gallon or exactly 29.5735295625 mL, making it about 4.08% larger than the imperial fluid ounce.
A US food labeling fluid ounce is exactly 30 mL.
So we have 28.4g, 29.6g or 30g of water. An ounce is 28.3g (closest to the imperial measures and neither of the US ones, despite the ounce being common to imperial and US systems)
I’d consider that within the margin of error for a volumetric measurement. Especially if you are being lazy like me and measuring something like milk by weight.
Funny enough, you made me go check my kitchen scales. They report in grams, ounces, and weirdly milliliters and fluid ounces. I used my scale that reports in hundredths of a gram to measure out exactly 1 oz mass. I then placed it on my other three scales to see what it would read. 2 of them correctly reported that they weren’t quite at 1 fluid ounce, while the other said it was. I never actually put my scales in ounce mode, though.
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’ve never even considered weighing spices. They’re usually given in teaspoons or just as “a pinch” even if the rest of the recipe uses grams and milliliters.
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…
Here it’s nutrition information by the gram, serving size by the gram, packaging by the millilitre.
The only way you can compare the relative value of different ice creams is by using the serving size and # servings info from the nutrition panel to calculate the grams per package. (Or even better, comparing g/fat per package because that’s where the value is).
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.
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.
Lol. Dude, you’re laughably wrong about this. Omg, I could just imagine trying to get lava cake out to the second or it being no good. Not even talking about how much temp, elevation, and humidity effect things to make “perfect recipes” non existent.
Also, “oh no. Your nutmeg is now 6 weeks old. You’ll have to add an extra 0.9% of it to your recipe”
Cupcakes aren’t like making Walter Whites blue meth, Hun.
Baking is not an exact science
It’s not, you will be blown away at how much you can wing it and still make a delicious cake or cookies.
Just because no one in your life cares enough about your niche opinion to actually have an opinion does not make that an “unpopular opinion.” When your opinion is the opinion of hobbyists, professionals, and elites alike, it’s certain not unpopular, even if it is niche.
You’re certainly right in your opinion, and that’s the point of bitching at you.
OP is probably from Western Europe, where a kitchen scale is common. Ain’t nobody in the US got a fancy kitchen scale.
The solution to their problem is use mL for volume.
Ain’t nobody in the US got a fancy kitchen scale.
Lots of us have them. (Well, basic scales which weigh a tenth of a gram.) They’re useful when weighing compressible dry ingredients like flour and brown sugar, and viscous wet ingredients like molasses and corn syrup. They’re also helpful when you’re multiplying a recipe by a factor that doesn’t result in useful units; it’s annoying to figure out how to measure out fractional cups that involve teaspoons.
They also help with portion control if you’re watching calories.
You can get your panties in a twist over accuracy (it doesnt matter as much as you think it does) but what youre really mad it is American cultural hegemony. So yeah good luck yelling in to the void I guess.
