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

  • inconel@lemmy.caOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    9 hours ago

    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.

    • Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 hours ago

      While it’s chemistry, there is a bit of an art to it, and you can be off by a bit and still have perfectly good bread.

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      6 hours ago

      I feel like this is just a remnant of a time where a container with a bunch of lines on it was cheaper than a sufficiently accurate scale. It might just go away over 1-2 more generations.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        4 hours ago

        Anyone who gets into baking today will quickly learn volumetric measuring doesn’t work.

        Basic baking you can get away with volumetric (simple breads, for example). Anything beyond that… Well, good luck.

        Scales have been cheap for a couple generations now. Digital scales didn’t exist until I was an adult, but the cheap spring type did. And those were maybe $5 decades ago. It’s more about awareness and knowledge. Cookbooks 50 years ago wouldn’t have had weight measurements because people didn’t have scales.

    • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      7 hours ago

      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.

      • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 hours ago

        You mean a separate bowl from the main container, right? So you can remove over-scoops without disturbing the previous ingredients? I’m still trying to get comfortable with my scale. I get frustrated because there’s not parts of grams, and it doesn’t seem to constantly update, it just jumps from too little to too much.

        • Baggins [he/him]@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          16 minutes ago

          Always 2nd bowl. Having a more sensitive scale helps with it updating faster. You can also tap the scale to try and get it to update.

          I use a 0.1g/2kg scale for most things, I also have a 1g/5kg one I never use. I can’t find it rn but I also have a 0.01g/100g scale for when smartasses on the internet tell me to weigh a 1/8 tsp of pepper.

          • flicker@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            2 hours ago

            I have a 1/8 teaspoon but the idea is… why? Anything being pinched, I’m not digging out a measuring spoon for.

            Measuring by volume is definitely ridiculous. I’m an USAmerican baker.

    • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      8 hours ago

      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.