Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by magicalhippo 1421 days ago
Why does the recipe call for 47 grams of eggs... must it be exactly 47 grams, or did they just mean one medium egg? How am I to know?

Stuff like that drives me up the wall when reading recipes.

1 comments

If you've ever actually seen '47g eggs' it's surely almost certainly because it's been scaled down from a much larger (i.e. commercial) recipe where that would make more sense.

You can buy (in the UK anyway) cartons of egg whites/yolks (separately) - which I think makes a tonne of sense for non-egg-whole cooking, and would love for it to be more common (i.e. cheaper, came out considerably more expensive when I did some 'napkin math' on it a while ago; separating eggs isn't hard/annoying enough to warrant it, I concluded) - but even then you'd surely measure it by volume, not mass.

Eggs by mass is surely whole, shell included; so yeah it's pretty much inherently approximate - as close as you can easily get to 47 (or more likely 470 or 4700) grams with whole eggs.