Used a couple of US recipes recently and most of the ingredients are in cups, or spoons, not by weight. This is a nightmare to convert. Do Americans not own scales or something? What’s the reason for measuring everything by volume?
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Apparently the French sent over a metric system for the Americans to use, but the ship was lost.
I’ve seen numerous sources for this.
OP is asking about volume vs weight, not metric volume vs imperial volume.
If the US had adopted the metric system it wouldn’t matter.
And that still doesn’t answer the question.
You do know that metric measures both volume and weight, right? A cubic centimeter of water weighs one gram.
And one pint of water is one pound.
You’ve completely missed the point, which is that most of the world measures ingredients (like flour for instance, where one pint is not one pound) by weight and not by volume.
A pint of water is not one pound, its 1.04318, which is a significant difference.
In what widely-used context is a .04318 difference significant?
Not soup. Not bread.
I don’t think even concrete would suffer noticeably from that difference.
Unless you’re baking cakes from scratch for fun or trying to make aesthetically perfect macarons, I just don’t really see a reason to use a scale.
With cup measurements, it’s scoop, level, dump. I hate having to fuss around with getting perfect measurements of ingredients; it’s the second-most boring part of cooking.
I really subscribe to Adam Ragusea’s methodology of “cooking by feel”, and just so happens it aligns with how my own culture treats cooking as well.
So how do you measure, let’s say, chicken breast with a cup?
Chicken just isn’t gonna need to be that precise. It’s not an ingredient that mixes with others in that way. That being said, chicken is an item that most recipes would mention by weight. Nobody is going to actually weigh out the chicken; they’ll just go with a close measurement, or use potentially use the packaging it came in for reference.
As an American who has recently learned to love his scale, I’m with you 100%. With that being said, no, many Americans do not have kitchen scales.
Just another one of those things where the rest of world looks at the US and shakes its head. There seems to be a lot of things in the US purely in place based on tradition and logic goes out the window.
Why should I take an extra step to weigh everything out? Why should I give up some valuable counter space for a food scale? That’s just extra work for no reason.
Precision. Volume varies by how tightly something is packed, how finely something is diced, etc. I’ve seen recipes that recommend spooning flour into the measuring cup to ensure it’s not packed in tightly, so you don’t use too much. How much simpler is it to just weigh it?
Unless you’re a professional chef it does not matter if you use 65 grams or 70 grams of something in a recipe. Makes zero difference.
I’m happy that you don’t need it, but some of us like better precision. Plus, it’s convenient to put a mixing bowl on a scale and add things by weight, rather than using numerous measuring cups.
You add thing using cups, dude
F-e-w-e-r D-i-s-h-e-s
