[kijin]

A short time at 250C will make for extra crispy cookies, but the dough will have to be thin or the outside will be charred black before the inside is cooked. It takes trial and error to find the right balance. :)

A metric teaspoon is 5ml and a metric tablespoon is 15ml. They're perfectly acceptable units, not to mention convenient. Would you rather use 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda or measure 2.5 grams on a kitchen scale? I live in a fully metric country but whenever I need to use a recipe written in grams, I immediately convert them to ts/TS/cups and never look at the gram figure again.

[fault_lines]

I would rather measure 2.5 grams on the scale I'm already using, it's far easier. Volumetric measurements should only be used for liquids.

[thepratt]

I go even further and use no volumetric measures. So grams for water, milk, etc. Having to read off the scale I can assure I have 500g water and not 520mL b/c I read the meniscus wrong.

I'll still convert for other recipies, water being the easiest to convert as 1mL should be 1g.

The grams for everything is a habit I've picked up from reading a lot of modernist recipes.

[huhtenberg]

> Would you rather use 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda or measure 2.5 grams on a kitchen scale?

Not every ingredient has a density of water, so these aren't necessarily the same.

[kijin]

Which is exactly why I would advise OP against trying to convert their teaspoons into grams. Unless they're very careful, they're bound to get inaccurate results.

As it happens, baking soda has a density of 2.2g/cm^3. But the powdered form contains lots of air between the granules, so the actual density comes down to somewhere just above the density of water. Using 3g instead of 2.5g in a recipe, though, will yield very different results.

[em-bee]

i prefer metric units always. i have spoons in all different sizes, and i can't always tell which measurements matter, and which don't. from metric units i can more easily figure out which spoon size i need.

[kijin]

Standard spoons for cooking are are much bigger than regular table spoons, and their volumes are clearly marked. There's no room for confusion.

Besides, it's not easy to convert from grams to spoons on the fly because different ingredients have different densities, and the density of powdered material is different from that of a solid block. The same problem arises when converting spoons to grams. The worst is when you encounter a recipe that has been converted from spoons to grams (or vice versa) using the wrong densities. It's like encoding an image in JPEG. Every conversion reduces the precision of the numbers.

[em-bee]

Standard spoons for cooking are are much bigger than regular table spoons

that's even worse. if i need specialized equipment to get the right measurements then where is the advantage? with metric units, a scale and a jar with markers for volume is all that i ever need to do all measurements in the kitchen.

what's more, both the scale and the jar can handle imperial units as well.

The worst is when you encounter a recipe that has been converted from spoons to grams (or vice versa) using the wrong densities

if the measurement is done at a specific density, and i redo the same measurement at a different density then it's going to be wrong no matter what. but if that is a problem, then volume is the wrong measurement to begin with.

this isn't even about metric vs imperial, because the same problem applies if the spoon is converted to imperial weight.

spoons need to be converted to mililiters or fluid ounces to avoid that problem.

this is not an argument to keep using spoons as units.

[kijin]

There are lots of recipes out there that call for 1/4 teaspoon of some kind of spice. That's easy to measure if you have the typical 1/4tsp, 1/2tsp, 1tsp, and 1TBS set. Not so easy on a low-cost kitchen scale (that still costs more than the spoon set!) that can't measure 0.6 grams accurately. So you need to get specialized equipment anyway.

[em-bee]

good point. i haven't seen such recipes yet, but i checked my scale and found that, while it claims to have 0.1g accuracy, it doesn't do well with amounts less than 0.5g.

(it's rather wierd. it does go up in 0.1g steps after 0.3g, but if i add something heavier and reset to 0, i have to add more than 0.3g again before it shows a change.)

[dragonwriter]

> Standard spoons for cooking are are much bigger than regular table spoons, and their volumes are clearly marked

No, measuring teaspoons and tablespoons aren't usually much larger than tea/tablespoons for use at the table.

They typically have shorter but wider handles and different shapes (often semispherical, but there are others).

[kijin]

Depends on what you use at your table. My tablespoons only seem to hold 10ml, and what passes for a teaspoon in my country is less than half the size of a measuring teaspoon. This kind of inconsistency is exactly why measuring spoons have been standardized.