… the gram is the only unit of measurement that I use.
In the cooking world, I would suggest that the gram is the Esperanto of measurement.
When you share a recipe with your (presumably French) neighbours, what do they make of teaspoons and tablespoons?
If you mention a cup of flour in a recipe, is that a slightly heaped cup scooped from a container, is levelled on top to be accurate, is it compressed to remove any air gaps, is it sieved to have a consistent texture?
When you say cup in a recipe, do you mean a metric cup of 250 ml, a British cup of 284 ml, an American standard cup of 236 ml, American legal cup of 240 ml, a Japanese cup of 200 ml, a Dutch cup of 150 ml, or Russian cup 131ml (source Wikipedia – other authorities may have other ideas!)?
In this global village we live in today, we get recipes from all over the world. The gram is unambiguous and the kitchen scale is the only measuring device ever needed.
As I’ve said elsewhere - then there are the measurements of my OH (and I’m sure he’s not the only one) “little bit if this”, “little bit of that”! The only time I’ve known him use scales was when he was making sourdough bread and managing the starter ratios.
My nearest neighbour must be related to your OH… trying to get the recipe for her “infamous” le pudding… and all I get is
le pain, cognac, raisins, oeufs… and anything else is lost in her laughter… I don’t think she wants me to know her secret
I think what @Mik_Bennett is going for here is the idea that weights (or mass if you are being picky) rather than volume are considerably more reliable for dry goods. It doesn’t matter whether you are using grams or ounces in my view, it’s weight rather than volume.
I disagree about liquid measures though! I use ml or fl oz depending on the recipe book and have an appropriate measuring jug!
When communicating recipes to French people, I use the measures that are standard in French cookery books - grams for dry measures and ml for liquid. I wouldn’t weigh liquid measures because the scales are calibrated for water only.
I understood your question and I hope answered it earlier but it does raise another point about measurement.
Suppose you have a recipe for couscous that requires 1 cup of boiling water for every 1 cup of grains. Does that mean one cup of water which is then boiled or one cup of boiling water? They are not same. They differ by about 5% because water expands as it heats up (above 4 deg C) whereas 230 grams of water remains the same at any temperature (ignoring evaporation), Whether this will affect your couscous is a different question.
I only use recipes as casual reference points for ideas and possibilities, or perhaps for cooking times if it’s an unfamiliar cut of meat
For me assiduously following someone else’s precise instructions for making something exactly to their taste or preference would suck the fun out of creative cooking. In my kitchen tasting regularly as I cook is far more important than precisely measuring amounts of ingredients
Spot on Angela. “weight” and “mass” seem to be used interchangeably in a similar way to using “precision” and “accuracy” to mean the same thing. A recipe which works here on Earth would not work on the moon if we relied on weights. If we accept that most (certainly not all) members of the forum live on this planet then I would hope to get away with using “weight”.
I beg to differ with you here. I don’t have any measuring jugs. I believe if you said “100 grams of milk”, any French person would understand that perfectly well. I don’t understand your comment about scales being calibrated for water. My scales only measure grams.
Many years ago I owned a Lotus Elise. One of the details that gave me the most pleasure was a warning notice in the boot: “load - maximum mass 35kg”.
Very Colin Chapman…
My point was that 100ml of milk doesn’t strictly speaking, weigh 100 grams! My scales do change units from grams to ounces and also to ml but that only works for water…