Weighing My Ingredients
Posted by Shanna on 1 January 2007
I love baking but I hate some recipes! Not because it is hard to do, but more like the measurements required! Take me as a close to perfectionist person when it comes to baking, but I’d prefer my recipes to be in metric units!
My cousin went to the extend of going to a supermarket quite far from her place which sells international produce to find out how much is ‘a stick of butter’! Why can’t it be converted to ounce or grams? Some recipes calls for half cup of butter, so do I melt the butter first (doubt it) or do I squash the butter into a measuring cup to measure it? Well, I usually cut the butter into smaller pieces and squash abit into the cup to measure it, and its usually a guessing game that ‘that should be just about half a cup’!
In fact, the best solution is, the recipe book should state both kinds of weights for the ingredients, E.g., grams/ounce. This would cater to more a wider and international audience. I can just imagine the Americans finding trouble with manually converting grams to cups, or for the British, ounce to cups, etc…!
For me, I have to just search the web for conversion of baking ingredients!
Thank goodness I have a measuring cup which states measurements in oz, cup and ml, maybe even pints! But the 1 stick of butter is still confusing!
So to future recipe book authors, can you cater your books to more an international audience? 
cat said
I TOTALLY agree with you .. the stick of bread thing irritates me to hell. I’m already irritated with the cup of flour type of cook books. So when I come across a book or a recipe that states ingredients in cups or sticks, I immediately drop the book and won’t read nor buy. I feel it’s very vague and inaccurate. Do you know the weight of a cup of flour does not equal to the weight of a cup of sugar ?? It’s really stupid. I know a professional baking teacher whom wouldn’t even mention teaspoon in his recipe. He would state them all in grams. He said teaspoon measurements are for housewives. hahaha. So let’s be pro here.
ngshanna said
How true! My aunt gave me her butter cake recipe but just measuring in spoonfuls! And I have to then weigh it to see how much it is! Especially when it comes to spoonfuls, is it a heap or just a scoop? Sigh… So troublesome! By the way, just baked the butter cake today! Will blog it later with photos!
mary a. kaufman said
Shanna, there is a gadget that allows one to measure ingredients such as butter without the hassle of having to pack an ingredient into a regular measuring cup and then scooping it out. Set the sliding inside disk to, say one quarter cup, fill the container and then push the disk up. The butter can be neatly scraped off the disk. Not so much as a smidgen of butter is wasted.