this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Unpopular Opinion [Locked]

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I'm tired of guessing which country the author is from when they use cup measurement and how densely they put flour in it.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 month ago (16 children)

i cant imagine this would be unpopular for anyone who actually bakes.

its so frustrating not having exact amounts for what is essentially chemistry.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 month ago (4 children)

I wanted to believe my opinion is popular yet recipes I've seen are almost in volume and I don't know why.

Baking is chemistry for sure.

[–] fartsparkles 19 points 1 month ago

My total guess is weighing scales used to be expensive / inaccessible for the common home baker and one of the first popular recipe books thus used volume, became wildly popular, and indirectly taught a generation of home bakers that baking recipes are by volume, not weight.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (6 children)

In my opinion every recipe should be in weight unless there's a good reason to put it in volume. The idea of washing half a dozen individual little measuring cups to prepare one recipe is absurd. Slap a bowl on your scale and go to town.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I feel like this is just a remnant of a time where a container with a bunch of lines on it was cheaper than a sufficiently accurate scale. It might just go away over 1-2 more generations.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I can't get my octogenarian mother to bake by weight, but she's certainly not on Lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (17 children)

Use non-American recipes.

The rest of the world does this. And guess what, 1 milliliter of water is exactly 1 gram, unlike stupid ounces.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If I want a recipe in English I always end the search query with "UK" to make sure it's in weight, not cups. I'm not a fucking toddler

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I try that too for English recipes but then I get things in tablespoons, teaspoons, pinches, good pinches, full pinches, and small bunches.

Or my favorite "a good knob of butter"

At least they aren't using stone for flour though lol.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 month ago (13 children)

Just because no one in your life cares enough about your niche opinion to actually have an opinion does not make that an "unpopular opinion." When your opinion is the opinion of hobbyists, professionals, and elites alike, it's certain not unpopular, even if it is niche.

You're certainly right in your opinion, and that's the point of bitching at you.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 month ago (3 children)

This isn't unpopular.

Anyone who learns to bake quickly learns this.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago (14 children)

Flour's ability to absorb water changes depending on what variety of wheat and where it was grown and what the weather was like during the season. Weight is also just a guideline. Baking is not an exact science.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Pretty sure any pastry chef will strongly disagree with that. If anything, baking is the cooking activity most akin to an exact science. The amounts need to be carefully measured, the temperatures need to be exactly right (e.g. Italian merengue), the baking time needs to be correct to the second for some dishes (lava cake).

Yes, the measures can change based on the flour or its substitutes (ground pistachio for example), but the processes involved require an equal amount of precision.

A lot of chefs call cooking an art, but baking a science.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I am a former pastry chef and baker. You'd think it's very precise work but it's actually mostly intuition based on experience. You know the recipes and tweak them as you go. Also the batch sizes are many times bigger than a home cook ever makes so a cup of flour more or less usually makes no difference to the end product. With leavening agents the margin of error is smaller obviously.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

And weather/storage. If flour is stored in a humid environment in a paper bag (like on a store shelf), it will get heavier as it takes on water. This messes up the weight of flour but also throws off the amount of water in the dough.

That said I prefer baking by weight, not because it’s more precise, but because I don’t dirty dishes for measurements.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you bake regularly then this is a popular opinion. I generally won’t bother with a recipe that does not have the weights.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago

Downvoted for popular opinion.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (2 children)

What, I'm supposed to use my kitchen scale for something other than cocaine?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

A cup of cocaine please.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Scale, fancy. I just keep going until the feelings disappear.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

You're doing it right. The scale is for selling not measuring doses.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Cleanup is so much easier also. I don’t have to use a measuring spoon or cup for ingredients—I just dispense them into the bowl until I hit the correct number.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Overshoot? Then what, scrape the flour out from the sugar?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You weigh ingredients in one bowl and pour into your mixing bowl. You still end up washing less

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

IMO anything sold by weight should be measured by weight in a recipe.

I could have an exception for things under 20g, which scales seem to get wrong a lot. I can do spoons, but not cups.

Also: Metric only. A tablespoon is anywhere from 13g to 20g depending on who you're talking to. A gram is always a gram.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

I am a proficient baker and I can get behind this.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My kitchen scale won’t measure below one gram, and a lot of things (spices and flavorings, mostly) are used in amounts below one gram.

So I can either dirty up some spoons, or go buy a second scale that only gets used for the small stuff…

In general I agree, of course, but there definitely is a use case for volumetric measuring spoons.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

yes. It's far easier to measure liquids by mass accurately

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

454 ml! Because 1 gram of water is also 1 milliliter.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Density of whole milk according to first google answer is 1,034g/cm^3.

It's been a while, but would that make it 438,68 ml?

Edit: But I totally agree with your statement. SI/ metric units is superior in every way with how easy it is to convert between them. At university in Norway I had American textbooks in all but one of my chemistry classes and all used SI/metric and proper names for the elements

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes, but in real units :P

I have one bowl and I just measure in all my wet by weight without dirtying a cup or spoon

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago
  • 2 cups of flour
  • 1oz of water
  • 50g of salt
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (20 children)

In the civilized world, they are. Except for liquids, but that's a given.

This stupid "How many grams is a f-ing cup of again?" is a pain in the a...

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

All dry ingredients should for sure and they are where I am from. I still measure them in a special cup in the end that converts different ingredients from grams into volume but I wouldn't know what to do with a "cup of flour" in the instructions either.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

So go to Europe.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The only exception to this should be militers/liters. Because if you have to use, as example, 1l of milk, this would, if you want to be exact, be about 1.05kg

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is not unpopular. At least acc. to my experience.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

The book "flour water salt yeast" is awesome for a lot of reasons, one of them is that all of the recipes are in grams, us volumes, and bakers percentages. I primarily use the grams measurements, but the bakers percentages makes it much easier to scale recipes up or down

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