[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.

[hyperman1]

whatever floats your boat, but it sounds a bit overkill to me.

As a european, I notice how imperial units are sometimes creeping back in. Even hating the crappy illogical mess, you learn to get some feeling just by exposure. Feet divided by 3 is about a meter, and 4 inch is 10cm. A mile is 1.5km.

For some reason I can remember pounds as 1/2 kg, but can never figure out lb without looking it up and finding it is also pounds.

A while ago, a local computer store mixed up feet and inch, and announced things like 14 feet laptop screens. I was the first to tell them, the mistake had been there for a month. It turns out non-USians know what a screen of size 14 is supposed to look like, and the word 'inch' behind it is treated like meaningless gibberish.

[CrazyStat]

Anything that you use often enough can be memorized. A cup of flour is 120g, for example. But I use something like molasses maybe 5 times a year, so I'm not going to remember how much a cup of molasses weighs.

(I use molasses as an example because, due to how sticky it is, I much prefer to measure it directly into my mixing bowl by weight rather than using a liquid measuring cup).

[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.