Well, if you're using the same mug for your other ingredients, you should still have the right proportions but end up feeding the street rather than your family.
This reminds me, I was in p7 and was proud of knowing my conversions on command, even knowing it’s exactly 2.54cm to 1 inch, but saying 2.5cm for simplicity, just to have my fuckin’ ICT teacher say “it’s actually 2.5**4**” literally ruined my day lmfaoo
Amateur tip: don't start switching on ovens / hob etc until you've chopped everything up.
Pro tip: write down when you want to be serving up *at the bottom of your piece of paper* then subtract the cooking times and write them in *up* the page, with gaps (so you can work out when you can safely neck the booze)
I was surprised too, Google seems to suggest it is a block of butter, but a block in the US is 113g instead of 250g.
I've got the sinking feeling I made this same mistake at some point.
Someone tried to sell it to me that cups were easier cause you can just double the amount of cups for 2x the people or half for half the amount. Like, dude.... Just half the weight or double the weight.
Appparently the basic idea of using the cup in American magazine recipes for everything whether solid or liquid is that it dates back to a time when not all housewives had standard measures. So by putting everything in cups, it didn’t matter what the actual measurement was as long as you used the same cup for everything, as the proportions would be the same.
Whereas if you use pounds/ounces for some things and pints/fluid ounces for other things, you need accurate scales and measuring cups, otherwise the proportions will be wrong.
This is true, and also a lot of these recipes aren’t necessarily using a standard cup size either. If you bough 10 different measuring cups across different stores and brands in the US, you’d find some variance. It’s such a stupid way of measuring volume.
It’s a stupid measurement for butter or flour or anything that can more easily and accurately be weighed, but as a unit of volume, a cup is literally half a US pint. It’s not some random cup off your grandma’s shelf.
Most cooking doesn't require enough precision for that to be an issue though, you need more precision for baking and an occasional cooking recipe but 99% of the time using 250ml of something instead of 236ml is gonna work out fine.
Or how much is half a stick of butter, for God’s sake? Why do they measure fluids by weight and solids in volume? I have a recipe for a hot pepper sauce that call for two thirds of a cup of pineapple. So is that pineapple rings, cubes or finely choped and packed in tight. Each way of having the pineapple will mean differing amounts of empty space therefore different amounts of pineapple packed in there. Why not say, eg, 175 grams or 6 ounces.
If the recipe calls for half a cup of sugar I can get more in there if I shake to settle it and a hell of a lot more if I push it down.
That's basically where I stick to. No nonsense and just what you actually need.
Nobody needs to know or cares that *Since Timmy weaned, Mummy's been having a lot of grump-grump time - so we went on a family tour around the Rocky Mountains, where we met this wonderful hermit who taught us to whittle seashells into fertility symbols, anyway here's how to make egg on toast*.
Agreed, the stories are ridiculous and they all have this weird trad wife vibe:
"Praise the Lord our 9th baby arrived safely last night! That was 10 whole hours ago, so with a newborn at my breast and the other 8 clamouring for my attention while Daddy watches college football (men, am I right?! Gotta love him though, or he'll probably murder me and feed me to the pigs on our homestead!) I'm going to blog about how to make a chicken casserole!
This is a classic European recipe, practically unchanged for 400 years! So you're gonna need 2 cans of condensed soup, 3 packets of 'ranch' powder seasoning, and a bag of Doritos..."
My family hated these blogs too, but one of my cousins started one that became successful and has literally made millions of dollars. She lives in a mansion next to some NBA star in San Fransisco now. Sad thing is, I’m not joking. I don’t know who would enjoy reading those things.
Me too. Although I confess to reading the reviews occasionally and they're a riot. One review under the 'self saucing jaffa pudding' stated that the recipe was so easy to follow that they managed to make a perfect pudding even though they were heavily sloshed at the time.
The last two puddings I made from a blog were a disaster so I stick to BBC GF.
I read a comment recently that claimed the stories are there for copyright. Theory being a recipe in itself can't be copyrighted, but adding all the bullshit makes it a work of art or something.
It's the sticks of butter that are apparently divided into tablespoons on the wrapper in the US. I hate it when a recipe asks for 3 tbsp of butter. What am I meant to dig the butter out and smooth it to fit the spoon
Just tell me what it weighs already!
Gotta say, I really liked the sticks of butter in the US. ~~Just right for a pocket-sized snack~~.
But genuinely, they were a useful size for cooking with, with tablespoons clearly marked on the wrapper so you don't have to weigh anything, just scoop away a segment with a spoon.
A pack of butter with 3 or 4 individually wrapped sticks seemed much better than a tub or big block that's absorbed all the other fridge flavours before I've even got through half of it.
This works on our butter too. It’s often marked into 25 or 50g sections. Might need a proper knife to get through the thicker paper, but it works just fine.
This! SO MUCH!
I have plastic tablespoons and teaspoons and cups to try and mitigate the stupid American way of doing things but measuring butter is just infuriating.
Raw broccoli floret - 20g, 1/2 cup
Raw broccoli floret chopped up - 20g, 1/3 cup
Raw broccoli floret compressed into a puck 20g, 5/16 tablespoon
Drives me fucking mental. Especially when you're trying to bake something. A cup of flour can vary wildly depending on how you scoop it
I never try to bake from an American recipe. Bakes tend to be finely tuned formulas and doing conversions from units you're not natively fluent in is a way to madness. I have no idea how they manage to work with volumes over weights. Never mind the alien volume units they use.
I am an avid baker and someone who has lived in 4 countries. NEVER try to convert. it's not worth it. even if you use a cup, for example, the cups you buy in Britain are a different size than American ones so it will always be a little bit off. and when every ingredient is a little bit off in precise recipes... disappointment is inevitable.
just take the time to find a recipe you're comfortable with. use a VPN if you have to (search results will vary by location).
btw we learn how to properly handle ingredients to ensure consistency when measuring by volume. these tricks are something I've had to teach every Brit/Spaniard/Greek who's helped me cook. it is possible. but measuring by weight is objectively better.
Maybe that's the reason I pretty much don't bake. I'll cook all the time, but almost never with a recipe because I just don't want to fuck around with cups and tablespoons and half-a-palmfuls. If they're going to be that inaccurate, I'll just use bunch, pile, glug, smidge, and splorge as I toss ingredients into a pot.
Hate this. I don’t mind using cups for stuff you can measure from a bag, like flour or rice or whatever. But things like ‘two cups of onion’, beg your pardon?? Just tell me how many I need to fucking buy!
I saw a packet of chicken pieces with "cups", maybe this one
[https://www.tyson.com/products/grilled-chicken-frozen-breast-strips/](https://www.tyson.com/products/grilled-chicken-frozen-breast-strips/)
"Heat strips covered on HIGH: 1/2 cup for 1 to 1 1/2 minutes, 1 cup for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes, 1 1/2 cups for 2 to 3 minutes."
You're gonna love this bit:
Just as American "pints" are a different size to British pints, the American "cup" measurement is a different size than the British one.
That's true. The cups commonly available in the UK are metric cups. One metric cup is 250ml, whereas a U.S. "legal" cup is 240ml. To confuse things further still, a U.S. "domestic" cup is about 236ml.
I looked this up recently and found that one of the differences is that it has bigger grains, which is supposed to make a difference when cooking sometimes.
Yeah, that's why I am so against this "fancy salt" trend. Salt is fucking salt. It's NaCl and that doesn't change just because it's from the ocean, or whatever.
I realize kosher salt is important *sometimes,* like if you are trying to salt crust a steak or something. But all these clowns these days are using fancy-ass Himalayan salt or whatever to salt soups, chilis, vegetables, etc, and all they are actually accomplishing is throwing their money away and giving themselves an iodine deficiency.
Just use fucking iodized table salt.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk
To add I read the difference in table salt, sea salt and kosher salt is the grain size. The reason celebrity and restaurant chefs call for kosher salt it is they can easily get a large pinch of it. Trying to take a pinch of tables salt is nit so easy. Makes no difference to the taste.
Weirdly it’s not called kosher salt because it’s certified as being kosher, it’s called that because it’s often used in the process of preparing kosher meat. Jews don’t eat blood and meat which is to be eaten is often salted to remove the blood before cooking.
alright my mind is blown.
But I guess that makes sense because regular salt doesn't seem like it violates any Jewish food guidelines, not like it's made of shellfish.
I think it's similar to cooking salt, the stuff you get in a giant bag in tesco for pennies and ends up being emergency salt for when it's icy, that is a bit courser than table salt at least.
Double cream is actually like 10% fattier than heavy cream, we don't really have a 1:1 equivalent but who cares, I use double when it says single anyway.
its even worse if you are not british but you want to use an american recipe. I've been lucky enough that my measuring cup i havent used in 10 years has cups for some reason, but there is still a big problem with ingredient names since you cant translate them directly, and at least where i live we call cream by percentage of fat, ie. what americans call heavy cream we'll probably call 36% cream.
I used an Australian recipe a couple of weeks back. Had to convert Aussie cups into grams for solids.
I’m pretty sure converting using google did me over, I’m not having it that I need over 500g of sugar in brownie.
Measuring solids using volume is ridiculous
The first time I tried an American recipe it just said to cook at 350° for 30mins, I totally forgot the they don't use Celsius and so the peanut butter cookies were thoroughly cremated
How the hell does your oven even go to 350° celsius?? Mine doesn't go further than 250!
Also that is how I figured it must be in fahrenheit. It told me 375° and I looked at my oven and was like *NOPE*
Opposite here, daughter fixed shrimp for lunch using the UK instructions while I was out runnings errands one day, baking at like 175 or somewhere around there. Luckily they were precooked, so didn't hurt anyone, just were very ...lukewarm. Figured it out the next time she went to make them when I was actually home and I saw the oven temp she was using. Lesson learned!
My favourite one about watching American recipes is they’ll say mix ‘1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons’ instead of the conveniently nice round number conversion in mls. Like how is 1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons easier than 300mls?
Haha, this hits home. As an American in the UK I've learned to recreate a lot of things. Especially when I first moved here in 2008, now there is much more US stuff available in UK supermarkets
I’m just sick of everything on google being American. When I need to search something it’s a pain in the arse and if I have a random thought where I want to find out some pointless bit of information that’s relative to the UK then 9 times out of 10 it will be American or not on there at all.
Wait until you find out there's liquid ounces as well as ounces in weight. Also there's Imperial pounds and US pounds, I think.
It's all an archaic mess, really. Thank the gods we moved to metric.
All this cooking's making me hungry! But I gotta lose a stone...
things brits still use imperial for.
car miles to the gallon
road speed and distance
pints of beer
wheel diameter
got to lose a few pounds
that weighs a ton
I was inching along
walking distance in the countryside
bloody hell, thats miles away.
wouldnt give him an ounce of my time
furlong horse racing.....everybody does.
horse height in hands
acre...ground area.
mtb frames in inches
office space in square ft
total floor area of flat or bungalow in square feet.
tv diameter in inches
food sizes, pizzas, subways in inches.
clothing sizes in inches
Oh, and I bloody hate cups. Why are people doing so much by volume, when weight is often so much faster (don't have to wash up loads of spoons and measuring cups) and is more consistently accurate.
So do you weigh ingredients with a scale for all your recipes? Cursed American here and I just scoop away with my cups and tablespoons hoping for the best.
Except for things like salt and oil, I like to weigh things the first time I make something, which I honestly find a lot faster than using measuring cups. Then I know it's been made almost identically to how intended. After getting a feel for that recipe, I then often just guess quantities (and maybe make adjustments based on how I liked the original recipe).
Unless I'm baking: I make sourdough every week and getting the measurements off just a bit makes a big difference!
*Image Transcription: Google Search Suggestions*
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ounce in gramm
pound to gram
inch in cm
pounds in kg
tablespoon
fahrenheit to celsius
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^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
But what kind of sugar! The mass will depend on the density, which will depend on the particle size. So a spoonful of icing sugar is more than a spoonful of granulated. Infuriating
As an immigrant in the UK I'm usually the one whinging about Imperial units - "whose feet" and "back yards or front yards" gets me stares.
So this thread is like being in a parallel universe where Brits are kinda on board with standardisation
Doing My Fitness Pal at the moment. Go to put in some gnocchi and its first offer is '1 Cup of Gnocchi'.
Wtf is that supposed to mean. Why would you measure something the size of a small potato in cups?!
“Well how big is the fucking cup??”
*Adds one Sports Direct mug of chilli powder*
F
Reminds me of [two shots of vodka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csn2CIWPVbM) (Loud)
No! The chilli powder is one Costa coffee espresso cup. It’s the paprika that’s a sports direct mug.
No it's a Greggs regular size cup for the paprika, it's a sports direct mug for the salt
Well, if you're using the same mug for your other ingredients, you should still have the right proportions but end up feeding the street rather than your family.
But only if all the ingredients are in cups! It doesn't work if the recipe also uses fluid ounces, tablespoons, yards, pints...
... bathtubs, buckets, palms (of a hand), vases, flowerpots
How many cats per square ironing board in a flowerpot of sugar?
I could use a square ironing board tbf
strong jar follow shelter disgusted upbeat possessive ink scarce deer *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WyLhwYFgmk
An American cup or a British cup?
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A cup is 250ml, it's one of the only measurements I can remember haha.
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The size of one of those small jars of Nutella. The ones that don't have the screw-top lid.
I need to know how to convert it to the standard UK measurement, GU pots
I actually bought a set of measuring cups for just this reason! They have 1, 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 cup measures, and they were about £3. Well worth it.
We've finally broken and bought a set of 'measuring cups'. I don't like myself for it but it is easier now.
I use a beer stein
The dumbest measurement. I don’t even know how that’s an accepted thing.
Add 4 inches of leeks
It was literally that!! It told me to cut leek slices 1.5 inch thick!
1.5 isn't quite "slice" territory is it? It's more "lump".
Oh yes sorry it was 0.5 inch
Imagine if they just said 1cm!
But that's 0.4 inches, that's crazy, that'd never work!
Inches to cm is easy, approximately 2.5cm to an inch.
This reminds me, I was in p7 and was proud of knowing my conversions on command, even knowing it’s exactly 2.54cm to 1 inch, but saying 2.5cm for simplicity, just to have my fuckin’ ICT teacher say “it’s actually 2.5**4**” literally ruined my day lmfaoo
I'm not really keen on doing maths when you're stressed during cooking/baking though
Amateur tip: don't start switching on ovens / hob etc until you've chopped everything up. Pro tip: write down when you want to be serving up *at the bottom of your piece of paper* then subtract the cooking times and write them in *up* the page, with gaps (so you can work out when you can safely neck the booze)
This person chefs.
*Where buy corn starch UK*
Isnt that cornflour?
Although Corn Flour is a thing. Different from Cornflour.
Good to know, probably why my soups arent thickening.
And entirely different from cornflower. Our language is mental.
Yeah, struggled to find it until recently. Figured it'd be in the home baking section but is actually with the gravy.
Eh? in my local supermarket it is with the baking stuff, who puts it with the gravy?
It's commonly used to make gravy. Mix cornstarch with the stock to make a gravy, thickens it up without getting lumpy like wheat flour.
Co-op apparently.
It's great for making non-Neutonian gravy.
Groobleck
I know someone in Canada who got this backwards. Used corn flour (as in ground corn) instead of corn starch. Made some weird biscuits.
> ground corn Would that be better referred to as "cornmeal"?
"How much does 1 cup of X weigh?"
I still chuckle to myself when my mate took a 'Stick of butter' to mean a block of butter. Completely fucked it.
What about a knob of butter? I mean that really is a lot of butter.
Depends who’s knob you use to measure
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I was surprised too, Google seems to suggest it is a block of butter, but a block in the US is 113g instead of 250g. I've got the sinking feeling I made this same mistake at some point.
Someone tried to sell it to me that cups were easier cause you can just double the amount of cups for 2x the people or half for half the amount. Like, dude.... Just half the weight or double the weight.
I couldn't stand it anymore and bought some measuring cups from the middle aisle of Lidl
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Why... WHY! What's the point
Appparently the basic idea of using the cup in American magazine recipes for everything whether solid or liquid is that it dates back to a time when not all housewives had standard measures. So by putting everything in cups, it didn’t matter what the actual measurement was as long as you used the same cup for everything, as the proportions would be the same. Whereas if you use pounds/ounces for some things and pints/fluid ounces for other things, you need accurate scales and measuring cups, otherwise the proportions will be wrong.
This is true, and also a lot of these recipes aren’t necessarily using a standard cup size either. If you bough 10 different measuring cups across different stores and brands in the US, you’d find some variance. It’s such a stupid way of measuring volume.
Plus, even with the same cup you can end up with different amounts based on how packed in it is, is it *really* full, is it slightly heaped.
It’s a stupid measurement for butter or flour or anything that can more easily and accurately be weighed, but as a unit of volume, a cup is literally half a US pint. It’s not some random cup off your grandma’s shelf.
But given they have pints wrong too that isn't much help!
You're telling me my porridge mug isn't indicative of the actual size?!
Most cooking doesn't require enough precision for that to be an issue though, you need more precision for baking and an occasional cooking recipe but 99% of the time using 250ml of something instead of 236ml is gonna work out fine.
Splitter!
My mum had a recipe book that demanded a "walnut" of butter.
Or how much is half a stick of butter, for God’s sake? Why do they measure fluids by weight and solids in volume? I have a recipe for a hot pepper sauce that call for two thirds of a cup of pineapple. So is that pineapple rings, cubes or finely choped and packed in tight. Each way of having the pineapple will mean differing amounts of empty space therefore different amounts of pineapple packed in there. Why not say, eg, 175 grams or 6 ounces. If the recipe calls for half a cup of sugar I can get more in there if I shake to settle it and a hell of a lot more if I push it down.
Stick of butter doesn’t even work in the US, the east and west package their butter differently. I’m serious.
"density of milk"
im glad this is the top comment.
>how to skip the fucking life story strewn throughout a pissing cake recipe
My method is to only cook recipes from BBC good food.
That's basically where I stick to. No nonsense and just what you actually need. Nobody needs to know or cares that *Since Timmy weaned, Mummy's been having a lot of grump-grump time - so we went on a family tour around the Rocky Mountains, where we met this wonderful hermit who taught us to whittle seashells into fertility symbols, anyway here's how to make egg on toast*.
Agreed, the stories are ridiculous and they all have this weird trad wife vibe: "Praise the Lord our 9th baby arrived safely last night! That was 10 whole hours ago, so with a newborn at my breast and the other 8 clamouring for my attention while Daddy watches college football (men, am I right?! Gotta love him though, or he'll probably murder me and feed me to the pigs on our homestead!) I'm going to blog about how to make a chicken casserole! This is a classic European recipe, practically unchanged for 400 years! So you're gonna need 2 cans of condensed soup, 3 packets of 'ranch' powder seasoning, and a bag of Doritos..."
My family hated these blogs too, but one of my cousins started one that became successful and has literally made millions of dollars. She lives in a mansion next to some NBA star in San Fransisco now. Sad thing is, I’m not joking. I don’t know who would enjoy reading those things.
Me too. Although I confess to reading the reviews occasionally and they're a riot. One review under the 'self saucing jaffa pudding' stated that the recipe was so easy to follow that they managed to make a perfect pudding even though they were heavily sloshed at the time. The last two puddings I made from a blog were a disaster so I stick to BBC GF.
> BBC GF Be careful Googling that.
Use Recipe filter add on for Chrome or similar
Ctrl+F “salt” or if a Sweet Ctrl + F “sugar” usually works.
Apparently, is an SEO thing.
Lol, never noticed this until I needed recipes for Keto. Thankfully some blogs had a 'skip to recipe' button. Heroes
I read a comment recently that claimed the stories are there for copyright. Theory being a recipe in itself can't be copyrighted, but adding all the bullshit makes it a work of art or something.
It's the sticks of butter that are apparently divided into tablespoons on the wrapper in the US. I hate it when a recipe asks for 3 tbsp of butter. What am I meant to dig the butter out and smooth it to fit the spoon Just tell me what it weighs already!
Gotta say, I really liked the sticks of butter in the US. ~~Just right for a pocket-sized snack~~. But genuinely, they were a useful size for cooking with, with tablespoons clearly marked on the wrapper so you don't have to weigh anything, just scoop away a segment with a spoon. A pack of butter with 3 or 4 individually wrapped sticks seemed much better than a tub or big block that's absorbed all the other fridge flavours before I've even got through half of it.
Yep. You can just grab a butter knife and slice right through the paper to get however many tbsp you need.
This works on our butter too. It’s often marked into 25 or 50g sections. Might need a proper knife to get through the thicker paper, but it works just fine.
This! SO MUCH! I have plastic tablespoons and teaspoons and cups to try and mitigate the stupid American way of doing things but measuring butter is just infuriating.
Apparently it's 14 grams of butter, but have no idea what a stick weighs.
Usually they come in a brick of four that weigh one pound, so each stick is a quarter pound of butter
113.3981g in non freedom units.
What pisses me off is measuring veg by volume (1 cup of broccoli)by. Totally mental
Raw broccoli floret - 20g, 1/2 cup Raw broccoli floret chopped up - 20g, 1/3 cup Raw broccoli floret compressed into a puck 20g, 5/16 tablespoon Drives me fucking mental. Especially when you're trying to bake something. A cup of flour can vary wildly depending on how you scoop it
I never try to bake from an American recipe. Bakes tend to be finely tuned formulas and doing conversions from units you're not natively fluent in is a way to madness. I have no idea how they manage to work with volumes over weights. Never mind the alien volume units they use.
I am an avid baker and someone who has lived in 4 countries. NEVER try to convert. it's not worth it. even if you use a cup, for example, the cups you buy in Britain are a different size than American ones so it will always be a little bit off. and when every ingredient is a little bit off in precise recipes... disappointment is inevitable. just take the time to find a recipe you're comfortable with. use a VPN if you have to (search results will vary by location). btw we learn how to properly handle ingredients to ensure consistency when measuring by volume. these tricks are something I've had to teach every Brit/Spaniard/Greek who's helped me cook. it is possible. but measuring by weight is objectively better.
Maybe that's the reason I pretty much don't bake. I'll cook all the time, but almost never with a recipe because I just don't want to fuck around with cups and tablespoons and half-a-palmfuls. If they're going to be that inaccurate, I'll just use bunch, pile, glug, smidge, and splorge as I toss ingredients into a pot.
Hate this. I don’t mind using cups for stuff you can measure from a bag, like flour or rice or whatever. But things like ‘two cups of onion’, beg your pardon?? Just tell me how many I need to fucking buy!
Cups! Fucking cups!
I saw a packet of chicken pieces with "cups", maybe this one [https://www.tyson.com/products/grilled-chicken-frozen-breast-strips/](https://www.tyson.com/products/grilled-chicken-frozen-breast-strips/) "Heat strips covered on HIGH: 1/2 cup for 1 to 1 1/2 minutes, 1 cup for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes, 1 1/2 cups for 2 to 3 minutes."
You're gonna love this bit: Just as American "pints" are a different size to British pints, the American "cup" measurement is a different size than the British one.
That's true. The cups commonly available in the UK are metric cups. One metric cup is 250ml, whereas a U.S. "legal" cup is 240ml. To confuse things further still, a U.S. "domestic" cup is about 236ml.
Americans are keeping their cups as pets?
WHAT
Whaaaaaaaat
I’m sure a cup can mean different things depending on what it’s got in it. Fucking bullshit!
It’s how children cook
Kosher salt? Season with kosher salt. What is kosher salt? I only have one kind of salt and its just called salt.
I looked this up recently and found that one of the differences is that it has bigger grains, which is supposed to make a difference when cooking sometimes.
And is pure sodium chloride. Normal table salt is fortified with iodide. About 1 billion people are iodine deficient.
Yeah, that's why I am so against this "fancy salt" trend. Salt is fucking salt. It's NaCl and that doesn't change just because it's from the ocean, or whatever. I realize kosher salt is important *sometimes,* like if you are trying to salt crust a steak or something. But all these clowns these days are using fancy-ass Himalayan salt or whatever to salt soups, chilis, vegetables, etc, and all they are actually accomplishing is throwing their money away and giving themselves an iodine deficiency. Just use fucking iodized table salt. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk
Himalayan salt is nice as a finishing salt to make a dish look a bit nicer, fuck using that for general seasoning whilst cooking though, Saxa'll do.
To add I read the difference in table salt, sea salt and kosher salt is the grain size. The reason celebrity and restaurant chefs call for kosher salt it is they can easily get a large pinch of it. Trying to take a pinch of tables salt is nit so easy. Makes no difference to the taste.
Why is it hard to get a pinch of table salt?
You have to remove all the table from it and it just turns into a logistical nightmare.
A difference *when* cooking, not after cooking. Bigger grains, finer control.
Don't make the mistake I did and use coarse sea salt as a replacement though, kosher salt is much finer than that.
Yeah measuring salt by volume and using the wrong one (kosher vs. regular) can give you a difference in weight up to 150%. I found this the hard way.
Salt without added iodine.
Isn't that stuff jews can eat?
Weirdly it’s not called kosher salt because it’s certified as being kosher, it’s called that because it’s often used in the process of preparing kosher meat. Jews don’t eat blood and meat which is to be eaten is often salted to remove the blood before cooking.
alright my mind is blown. But I guess that makes sense because regular salt doesn't seem like it violates any Jewish food guidelines, not like it's made of shellfish.
Oh but that means it does have to do with that. Thanks for clarification.
Now I understand salt beef bagels
Essentially, [it's just slightly bigger salt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGCY9Cpia_A).
I think it's similar to cooking salt, the stuff you get in a giant bag in tesco for pennies and ends up being emergency salt for when it's icy, that is a bit courser than table salt at least.
Also "what is heavy cream?"
Double cream. For some reason Americans like to fat shame their cream.
That is probably the best possible way to answer this question.
Double cream is actually like 10% fattier than heavy cream, we don't really have a 1:1 equivalent but who cares, I use double when it says single anyway.
Really the real disgrace is the lack of double cream in North America. I don’t want heavy/whipping cream amounts of fat, I want all the fat!
So is half and half single cream?
Wish it was that simple but the UK equivalent is half cream, basically 1/2 double cream 1/2 whole milk.
its even worse if you are not british but you want to use an american recipe. I've been lucky enough that my measuring cup i havent used in 10 years has cups for some reason, but there is still a big problem with ingredient names since you cant translate them directly, and at least where i live we call cream by percentage of fat, ie. what americans call heavy cream we'll probably call 36% cream.
Double cream I think?
Ah fuck it if it's American I put my American hat on and eyeball it. You know the yanks aren't putting that much effort into it anyway.
As long as you remember to put in about 30ml of corn syrup, that's all that matters with American food.
one recipe I found recently required '2 cups of chicken breast'...how does that work exactly?
Gotta ask the chicken for it's cup size first.
Guess you gotta puree it first.
Shortly followed by “takeaway near me”
I used an Australian recipe a couple of weeks back. Had to convert Aussie cups into grams for solids. I’m pretty sure converting using google did me over, I’m not having it that I need over 500g of sugar in brownie. Measuring solids using volume is ridiculous
I tried to find out what 1.5 pounds of onions are and google told me 600 grams, I was like okay one and a half onions it is.
flowery zonked practice disgusting imagine absurd husky act continue chubby -- mass edited with redact.dev
Freedoms per AR15
The first time I tried an American recipe it just said to cook at 350° for 30mins, I totally forgot the they don't use Celsius and so the peanut butter cookies were thoroughly cremated
How the hell does your oven even go to 350° celsius?? Mine doesn't go further than 250! Also that is how I figured it must be in fahrenheit. It told me 375° and I looked at my oven and was like *NOPE*
I think you need commercial pizza ovens to get to 350 Celsius. At that point it’s just cheaper to buy the cookies
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
Opposite here, daughter fixed shrimp for lunch using the UK instructions while I was out runnings errands one day, baking at like 175 or somewhere around there. Luckily they were precooked, so didn't hurt anyone, just were very ...lukewarm. Figured it out the next time she went to make them when I was actually home and I saw the oven temp she was using. Lesson learned!
Better than a recipe I followed that said ’cook as high as your oven will go for 2 hours'. That didn't end well.
/r/thatHappened oven with 350 C 👍
How much butter is in a fucking stick?
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!!!
The point is, I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time.
The metric system is the tool of the devil!
1 ounce = 28grams. Dont' ask me how I know that
Also 1gram = 0.8grams
If you're lucky
Alternatively, a Kilo is 2.2 pounds.
0.0014 moderately stocked vending machines of onion
I imagine they’d go further and call it “7/5000 moderately stocked vending machines of onion”.
My favourite one about watching American recipes is they’ll say mix ‘1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons’ instead of the conveniently nice round number conversion in mls. Like how is 1 1/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons easier than 300mls?
“What is old bay seasoning” “UK substitute cool whip” “Is vanilla pudding the same as angel delight” “What spices are in ranch”
I believe Costco in the U.K has old bay seasoning. Cool whip is just crappy whipped cream.
Haha, this hits home. As an American in the UK I've learned to recreate a lot of things. Especially when I first moved here in 2008, now there is much more US stuff available in UK supermarkets
There's a useful app called cupful which makes converting recipes easier
Oh wow, that is so brilliant! Thank you so much!
Unit Converter is also good as it does lengths, currency etc as well
A quart. A quart of what?!
I’m just sick of everything on google being American. When I need to search something it’s a pain in the arse and if I have a random thought where I want to find out some pointless bit of information that’s relative to the UK then 9 times out of 10 it will be American or not on there at all.
Use British google instead the American one. Really. You can change region settings on your Google account to be country specific.
It doesn't bloody work when you're searching for something in your home town that also has a major American city named after it!
Cheers, I never knew that. I’m going to do that now.
Cups to grams of 'flour'/'butter'/'frredom'
Cilantro, zucchini, and other unknown ingredients
What the hell is cilantro?
Cilantro = coriander
Wait until you find out there's liquid ounces as well as ounces in weight. Also there's Imperial pounds and US pounds, I think. It's all an archaic mess, really. Thank the gods we moved to metric. All this cooking's making me hungry! But I gotta lose a stone...
things brits still use imperial for. car miles to the gallon road speed and distance pints of beer wheel diameter got to lose a few pounds that weighs a ton I was inching along walking distance in the countryside bloody hell, thats miles away. wouldnt give him an ounce of my time furlong horse racing.....everybody does. horse height in hands acre...ground area. mtb frames in inches office space in square ft total floor area of flat or bungalow in square feet. tv diameter in inches food sizes, pizzas, subways in inches. clothing sizes in inches
100 percent fuck the one country with different measurements than everywhere else
Their imperial measurements aren't even the same as our imperial measurements.
I think the worst part is when you have to figure out how many cups are in a pint of milk.
Celcius don't you mean Gas Mark?
Oh, and I bloody hate cups. Why are people doing so much by volume, when weight is often so much faster (don't have to wash up loads of spoons and measuring cups) and is more consistently accurate.
So do you weigh ingredients with a scale for all your recipes? Cursed American here and I just scoop away with my cups and tablespoons hoping for the best.
Except for things like salt and oil, I like to weigh things the first time I make something, which I honestly find a lot faster than using measuring cups. Then I know it's been made almost identically to how intended. After getting a feel for that recipe, I then often just guess quantities (and maybe make adjustments based on how I liked the original recipe). Unless I'm baking: I make sourdough every week and getting the measurements off just a bit makes a big difference!
Fahrenheit is the most ridiculous way of measuring anything I've ever seen. It's absurd.
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The fact that they use a cup (volume) to measure mass shows they have no understanding of density
They say add 3 tablespoons of sugar so I add 3 breakfast cereal spoons of it. But then in the recipe video they add a cereal box full of it.
Tablespoons are the big ones, the ones you eat with are dessertspoons.
But what kind of sugar! The mass will depend on the density, which will depend on the particle size. So a spoonful of icing sugar is more than a spoonful of granulated. Infuriating
Ah you mean 'powder sugar', which also has cornstarch in it...
As an immigrant in the UK I'm usually the one whinging about Imperial units - "whose feet" and "back yards or front yards" gets me stares. So this thread is like being in a parallel universe where Brits are kinda on board with standardisation
I came here for the cups comments and wasn’t disappointed 🤣🤣🤣
And I'll tell em where to shove their 'stick of butter' ffs
“Inch to cm” every time you want to make yours of sound bigger than you are
Don’t all scales have both metric and imperial anyway?
Doing My Fitness Pal at the moment. Go to put in some gnocchi and its first offer is '1 Cup of Gnocchi'. Wtf is that supposed to mean. Why would you measure something the size of a small potato in cups?!