[CrazyStat]

> buy measuring cups in US sizes

Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit, since (1) the volume of a cup, while officially standardized, is not consistent across the measuring cups you'll find in stores, and (2) the amount (mass) of common ingredients in a cup can vary wildly--50% or more--depending on how densely packed the ingredient is.

A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but if you buy a brand new bag of flour at the store and scoop a cup off the top you may be getting as much as 200g, since it's densely packed. This obviously has serious implications for whatever you're baking.

TL;DR: Don't buy measuring cups.

[jsjohnst]

> A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but if you buy a brand new bag of flour at the store and scoop a cup off the top you may be getting as much as 200g, since it's densely packed.

I’m not debating if the US method of measurement in recipes is terrible or not (it is!). But taking an imprecise unit of measurement and lossy converting it to another is better (edit for clarity what I meant) each time you cook, while in the middle of cooking!?

[CrazyStat]

Yes, converting a cup of flour to 120g of flour is absolutely better. That way your measurements will be consistent from day to day, so you can learn and make adjustments--"This recipe calls for 300g flour, but the dough was a bit loose last time--I'll try 315g instead." (In practice I'd probably first adjust the liquid content rather than the flour amount, but you get the idea).

If you're measuring 2.5 cups of flour one day you might get 317g and another day you might get 362g, so you can't even make the same consistency dough twice.

[robonerd]

If you're simply trying to follow volumetric recipes, then volume-to-mass conversions are useless because you'd be trying to follow the recipe with more precision than the person who wrote the recipe in the first place. It's like converting "1 meter" to "1000 millimeters"; it's false precision from not being careful with significant figures. The recipe says "1 cup of flour" and the bot says that means 120 grams of flour. But that's false precision, specifically because volumetric measurement of flour is inherently imprecise. There is no way of knowing the recipe author actually used 120 grams of flour.

However, you mention that you iterate and refine these recipes, effectively writing your own recipes using volumetric recipes only as a starting point. In this case, the conversions have real utility. But if you're doing it right, these are conversions you only need to apply once per recipe, after which you'll never use that original volumetric recipe again. Such once-and-done tasks don't really seem worth automating to me, but for each their own I guess.

[CrazyStat]

I have hundreds of recipes in my file that I've never tried, requiring thousands of conversions. Even if each conversion is only done once it's absolutely worth automating.

[robonerd]

You're not cooking hundreds of recipes at once; I'd just convert them when I need them.

[CrazyStat]

Which is what I do, with the help of automation.

[jsjohnst]

> Yes, converting a cup of flour to 120g of flour is absolutely better.

Yes, but you do that once and done and then continue using the recipe in the future with the new quality measurement (adjusting as needed on future cooks). OP was advocating for using their Alexa to convert every time they cooked, specifically when their hands were full of raw sausage for example.

[CrazyStat]

Maybe they make new recipes on a regular basis, so they're doing it once per recipe but still fairly often. I have hundreds of recipes in my file that I haven't gotten around to trying yet, I could easily make a new recipe every day for a year.

I use a recipe app that has built-in conversions I can configure, but if I'm making a recipe out of a paper book I sometimes use Alexa to do conversions for me. Ideally I'd do all the conversions before I got my hands dirty, but that doesn't always happen.

[jsjohnst]

> Maybe they make new recipes on a regular basis, so they're doing it once per recipe but still fairly often.

Then memorize the conversions. It’s not that hard. Or you know, plan ahead and convert before cooking. Or simply just own up to the fact that the only reason an Alexa is a “insane QOL improvement” for this use case is SOLELY because you’ve rationalized it as such. This horse is now more than sufficiently beaten, so I’m backing away.

[CrazyStat]

I could memorize dozens of conversions, or I can outsource that mental load to a computer. The latter is a nice quality of life improvement.

[dragonwriter]

Most baking recipes that use volumetric units actually use standardize mass units converted in a conventional way (based on material and form) to volumetric units, because the recipes are done by pros for the kind of newbs that disproportionately consume recipes. They aren't imprecise measures they are measures for people who are more comfortable with imprecise tools.

If you prefer to work in mass, you reverse the conversion.

[CrazyStat]

One of my greatest cookbook-purchase disappointments was an English translation of a popular Italian cookbook, which converted all the mass measurements for ingredients like flour in the original to absurd volume measurements--"2 cups plus 5 tablespoons plus 3/4 teaspoon". The conversion can be reversed as you mention, of course, but it pains me just to read the recipes.

[ghaff]

>Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit

For baking, I'll generally weigh and, for flour, pretty much always. However, I use measuring cups all the time for other cooking where recipes may not even give a weight equivalent to a volume of something.

[CrazyStat]

That's fair. In many recipes volumes can be taken as vague suggestions.