this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
319 points (88.4% liked)

Unpopular Opinion

6339 readers
13 users here now

Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!


How voting works:

Vote the opposite of the norm.


If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.



Guidelines:

Tag your post, if possible (not required)


  • If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
  • If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].


Rules:

1. NO POLITICS


Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.


2. Be civil.


Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...


Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.


5. No trolling.


This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.



Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm tired of guessing which country the author is from when they use cup measurement and how densely they put flour in it.

(page 3) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I like weight measurement best, except for a few things I don't really want to bother measuring closely, like cornbread or ricotta cake. Those I just know by volume and can scale up based on the number of eggs, and aren't fussy.

So for cornbread I know the dry mix is half cornmeal half flour, with a spoonful of baking powder, half spoonful of salt, big pinch of baking soda for each cup of that mix. One cup of that for each egg you have; melt a whole stick of butter in the iron skillet at 425F while you mix the dry stuff, when it's hot add the eggs and enough buttermilk to make a thick batter (have literally never measured the buttermilk), pour the melted butter in, stir briefly, then pour batter into pan and bake 20-25 minutes. Has never failed, and I'm sure it's never exactly the same twice. It doesn't matter.

"Recipes" like that I enjoy. And most of my cooking is loosey goosey like that.

But bread, and fancy cakes, and even cocktais, 100% agree, I would prefer to pull out the scale and SO much easier to do weight, in grams.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

All baking recipes should be in mass for the dry ingredients and volume for the wet ingredients, definitely NOT weight. Because measuring flour by grams (mass) makes sense, but measuring flour by pounds (weight) is fucking stupid. Lots of people in this thread pretending to be smart by using SI units, but were apparently asleep in class when the teacher covered the difference between weight and mass. If you're going to get picky about such a trifling difference between a volume of sugar and a certain mass of sugar at least get the details correct.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Stop getting recipes from whatever random source pops up in Google, and start getting recipes directly from sources you trust. Reputable test kitchens usually use mass for recipes, and at least the ones I look at will also include volumetric measurements for people who prefer them.

The thing with baking, though, is that there are many ingredients that require below gram level accuracy, and for those, volumetric measurements are more accurate for most people who have scales with a gram resolution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The baking recipe sites I use regularly like kingarthurbaking.com and nytimes.com/recipes pretty much always use weights. Some old recipes will still use volume. Unless the source is old (printed cookbooks, historical recipes online) I definitely have a prejudice against sites that rely on volume.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Those 2 are for sure on my good list. Also Bon Appétit and serious eats, too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

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...

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Not really unpopular. That said, while flour (kind of the backbone of most baking recipes) is prone to being inaccurate when measured by volume, there are a lot of ingredients which do not have this problem and are not as sensitive to being measured wrong. If a cookie recipe calls for a quarter cup of chocolate chips that's probably fine. I think a lot of people don't have a scale sensitive enough to measure a half gram of yeast, either.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›