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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.
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.
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...
I do like when recipes give me liquids by weight as well. One tool for measuring everything is nice.
If you live in a place that uses cups, the container the food comes in typically has both measurements as part of the nutrition facts on the back label. US nutrition facts are per-serving not per-100g like the EU, so for flour for example, it will have "serving size 1/4 cup (30 g)". The main exceptions are items meant to be eaten in their entirety like a candy bar or, unfortunately, liquids, which give you milliliters.
Luckily, I live in a metric country, and nobody uses cups for measuring except from my wife who waters the plant with two cups of water.
The problem always arises when I find an American recipe with such fantastic measurements like "two cups of spinach". Yes, that is a real one.
Normally liquids are pretty standard, but I picked up a gallon of milk the other day and thought I must be sick or something. I handed it to my partner and she was along the same lines that it was extremely heavy. Not sure what happened there, but usually they weight around 4kg, this one had to be a lot more, 6kg maybe. I needed extra money to pay for some debts, so I was working instacart at nights. So I probably picked up 50 of them a week, always felt the same, this one... Not a single clue how it weighed so much, I figure if it goes bad the sun of the ingredients should be the same, its a closed environment.
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.
Same. Is the cups thing an american problem (again)?
It is. All recipes I have seen use weight. It wouldnt surprise me to see an american recipe use "2 bald eagle heads worth of sugar".
It would take way more than two bald eagle heads to equal a cup, smh.
Yes, weight is more accurate when you have scales however if you are doing something on the fly or don't have scales then volume gets you better results than trying to guess the weight.
My biggest problem with volume recipes is that very often they don't abide to the 250ml cup but use slightly larger or smaller cups, which causes variations. There is also the caveat of not having a measuring cup available just as I previously mentioned not always having scales available.
With all that said, ideally recipes should include both weight and volume measurements at all times.
in baking mise en place is even more important than in cooking. On the fly baking is not adviced
If it works why change it
Because it could work better
Highly recommend this book for baking for this and many reasons. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/250188/the-bread-bakers-apprentice-15th-anniversary-edition-by-peter-reinhart/
Stop getting recipes from whatever random source pops up in Google, and start getting recipes directly from sources you trust. Reputable test kitchens usually use mass for recipes, and at least the ones I look at will also include volumetric measurements for people who prefer them.
The thing with baking, though, is that there are many ingredients that require below gram level accuracy, and for those, volumetric measurements are more accurate for most people who have scales with a gram resolution.
My personal favorite experience relating to this was buying some ice cream with nutritional information by the milliliter, but with serving size by the gram...
You can get your panties in a twist over accuracy (it doesnt matter as much as you think it does) but what youre really mad it is American cultural hegemony. So yeah good luck yelling in to the void I guess.
It would be kind of annoying if you had do weigh all your liquids.
As someone who actually weighs their liquids. it's really not. Instead of pouring liquid into a measuring cup until it reaches how much ever you need, you put a cup/bowl on the scale, tare it, then still just pour in liquid until the scale reads how much ever you need.
If anything it's easier because it's more consistent. You can also re-tare and continue pouring more liquids or other ingredients into the same cup/bowl, cutting down on dishes.
The only annoying part is the first time you do it on a new recipe, where you have to do both measurements, so you can write down the mass for future reference.
Not really, not like the bowl has holes in it. Just pour it in until you hit the right amount like with everything else.
Seriously, i don't know why all these people keep saying they do volume for liquids. Unless you are using a skinny graduated cylinder, liquid measuring cups could easily get you 10% off your target.
And stuff like honey? No way I'm measuring volume for that.
Also most liquids are water basically, so you can just convert it 1:1 to volume if you want to use a measuring cup.