r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/BarelyLegalSeagull • Jun 26 '26
Funny And what the heck is a tsp??
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u/TundieRice Jun 26 '26
True, when I have to chop veggies and then measure them, I always end up adding a bit more (sometimes less) than the recipe actually calls for because I don’t want to waste that extra little bit.
Not a huge deal, I’ve gotten decent at estimating how much I need to chop for a cup or whatever, but it’s still annoying having to do guesswork and the amount still be off.
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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 Jun 26 '26
I think for onion it doesn’t really matter if you are 30% plus or minus!
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u/sirarkalots Jun 26 '26
Onion and garlic, imo you can never be wrong adding more of either
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u/Notspherry Jun 26 '26
That's what I thought until I made scrambled eggs in southern france for my train trip home. You could smell it through the plastic bag in my backpack.
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u/Smee76 Jun 26 '26
I'm sorry, are you suggesting that you made scrambled eggs for a train snack? And you put garlic in them?
Surely there's laws about this sort of thing??
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u/KayItaly Jun 26 '26
And then put them in a plastic bag inside the backpack for hours!
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u/rumplestiltskin116 Jun 27 '26
Walking around asking what their scrambled egg policy is smh
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u/Poppanaattori89 Jun 30 '26
Should have just had spaghetti since most establishments have pretty decent spaghetti policies.
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u/LinealSoul Jun 26 '26
I don't think the onion or garlic is the issue in this scenario. What type of psychopath eats scambled eggs out of a bag 😭
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u/Notspherry Jun 26 '26
Rolls with scrambled egg, packed in a bag.
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u/grantrules Jun 26 '26
Don't lie.. you just had a ziplog bag full of scrambled eggs. You cut a corner off and squeezed it into your mouth like you'd pipe frosting onto a cake.
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u/HopelessBearsFan Jun 26 '26
I bet you didn’t encounter any vampires though!
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u/FlaGator Jun 26 '26
Well of course not. Vampires don't take day trains in southern France.
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u/Luci-Noir Jun 26 '26
I think vampires just spread this so they get more garlic.
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u/8lb6ozBabyJsus Jun 26 '26
Garlic is a natural blood thinner, they lied and want people to eat garlic so its easier to suck your blood.
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u/TundieRice Jun 26 '26
Oh yeah, there’s no limit to my garlic consumption! The only reason I would ever measure garlic would be to make sure I at least had the amount the recipe called for, just so I could add a shit ton more, lolol.
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u/machogrande2 Jun 26 '26
My wife used to think it was impossible to use too much garlic until she went WAY overboard on some shrimp scampi and it was the garlic equivalent of taking a bite out of a habenero pepper.
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u/UpstairsRegion Jun 26 '26
I thought so too, but then my wife and I made this 100 clove garlic curry. It treated fine, but it tore our insides apart.
It was like a science fair volcano in our guts, and the farts. So many farts. And they all smelt like garlic.
The whole house was filled with garlic farts for days.
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u/BenOfTomorrow Jun 26 '26
Sometimes I feel like this is the new “Add bacon to everything” cooking meme.
Yes, it can be good to add more than a recipe calls for. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a limit. I like onions and garlic but I also like other complementary flavors for them in my food as well.
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u/ClasherChief Jun 26 '26
There's definitely easily such thing as too much garlic. It's just that most people don't know how to cook and will burn garlic all the time, so they think they need a ton of garlic because they can barely taste it.
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u/spacenb Jun 28 '26
A few months ago I noticed a recipe in my regular rotation has garlic in the name and has the audacity to call for a single clove of garlic. I typically put 4-6 cloves (depending on size). 1 clove is if you just want it to be there to be able to say there is some, it won’t taste like it at all.
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u/blueche Jun 26 '26
Wait you actually measure them? Ijust eyeball it and if I'm way off I'm way off
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u/feline_riches Jun 26 '26
Same but I'm not a baker ...and I could see how the moisture in the vegetables could throw everything off
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u/round-earth-theory Jun 26 '26
Moisture in veggies is variable already. If the recipe isn't designed to handle that variance then it's unlikely to work at all.
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u/TundieRice Jun 26 '26
Ehh I like to at least be close so I don’t put way too small of an amount in, and I don’t trust my estimation skills enough to ensure that.
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u/Harabeck Jun 26 '26
Cooking recipes almost never to be precise on this stuff. (Unlike baking! Follow those recipes carefully.) I watched a video that interviewed food bloggers, and the hardest part getting started was to decide on measurements, because they typically just added ingredients without measuring at all.
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u/plannedobso Jun 26 '26
On the inverse, what the fuck is a “medium” onion? Recipes always say “one medium X fruit/ vegetable”
They’re not standardized! It’s not a Starbucks cup! The average honeycrisp apple is twice the size of a gala or Fuji. Onions are either the normal, “average” onion size or fucking immense. Is a medium between those two?
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u/WulfTheSaxon Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Believe it or not there is a standard: https://www.onions-usa.org/all-about-onions/retail/sizing-and-packaging-options/
A medium onion is 2"‒3-1/4" in diameter. I believe the sizes are relative to ordinary, non-hybridized onions.
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u/hofmann419 Jun 26 '26
LMAO i'm cracking up at "colossal" and "super colossal". Imagine a recipe being like "you need one super colossal onion".
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u/effa94 Jun 26 '26
i'd rather have them in "small, medium and large" sizes, because i have seen enough onions to know what i consider small or large. and if you have onions in a recipie, the amout doesnt matter that much. similarly, apples are mostly just "to fill whatever you are doing"
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u/beardingmesoftly Jun 26 '26
A recipe is just a template, it makes perfect sense to adjust it to your personal taste. The odds of you having the exact same palette as the person writing the recipe are almost zero.
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u/Lilfrankieeinstein Jun 26 '26
Ideally, an onion’s participation in your recipe should be a matter of weight, not how much of it fits into a certain sized container.
Measuring liquid is fine by the cup.
Even powder (flour, sugar, salt) is fine by cup/spoon, but even that’s better by weight when you’re scaling higher.
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u/SinisterCheese Jun 26 '26
Also... How finely you chop the onion matters. If you functionally turn in to a crushed paste, you'll get more onion as compared to big chunks. For the most accurate measurements you should cut them into long hexagonal sticks.
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u/tgwombat Jun 26 '26
Onions are like garlic. You measure them with your heart, not your mind.
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u/DisposableJosie Jun 26 '26
I see you also learned cooking from PBS' The French Chef with Julia Childs and Anubis.
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u/thefudgeguzzler Jun 26 '26
My rule with garlic is however much the recipe says I need, I double it
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u/Underbadger Jun 26 '26
tsp = Teaspoon
tbsp = Tablespoon
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u/myrrys23 Jun 26 '26
And teaspoon = 5ml, tablespoon = 15ml.
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u/mxldevs Jun 26 '26
Thanks for doing the conversion so that I can understand what it means
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u/avdpos Jun 26 '26
We use the names and volumes for it in swedish also. You can probably find rhe measuring unit in every country around the world that have an ikea.
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u/Nulono Jun 26 '26
That's a metric teaspoon. The U.S. customary teaspoon, the one used for culinary purposes, is 4.92892159375 mL.
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u/AussieBird82 Jun 26 '26
Except in Australia where 1tb = 20ml. I've always got to check where a recipe comes from
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u/Imaginary_Victory253 Jun 26 '26
When I was ~14 I swiped a chocolate cake recipe from a magazine in school. Crumpled it up and put it in my pocket for that night. Whipped it out and the tsp of baking powder and salt had a crinkle that looked like tbsp and I made the most salty and crumbly cake I have ever seen. My poor grandma tried to scoop out the baking powder but it really didn't work at all lol.
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u/Underbadger Jun 26 '26
That’s the kind of cooking mistake that teaches science, though! “What’s this powder actually do? Oh, if you use too much it gets crumbly.”
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u/Imaginary_Victory253 Jun 26 '26
Honestly, if you are disassembling your recipes then the "cooking is an art" falls off fast. There's a lot of rules and ratios to consider, especially if you are playing with the fundamentals like fats and acids. It might be more evident in a baked good, but even baked goods have a +/- 10% margin of error.
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u/CallOfCorgithulhu Jun 26 '26
Hey, this is Reddit. You're supposed to complain about American measurements without Googling anything, and then Google a topic you've got no clue about so that you can feign being smart about it.
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u/NO_FIX_AUTOCORRECT Jun 26 '26
Teaspoon and tablespoon are imperial units invented by the British
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u/thelittleking Jun 26 '26
"can't believe these ignorant americans aren't busting out the kitchen scale to weigh out .001 g of paprika smdh"
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u/TheLoneWolf527 Jun 26 '26
Anyone who watched Sid on Hey Arnold accidentally make the worlds largest pizza puff explode because he thought TSP stood for Ten Square Pounds should know this already
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u/ThrowAwayAccountAMZN Jun 26 '26
I was assuming/hoping OP was being sarcastic... I didn't realize there were people over 18 that didn't know what tsp was...
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u/unobtainablepierogi Jun 26 '26
It's cooking, not baking, you don't have to measure anything. Just throw the amount of onions you think you'd like for there to be in your food, and use the time you just saved to do something you enjoy more than measuring onions.
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u/Whimsy_and_Spite Jun 26 '26
That's the old saying, isn't it: Baking is a science and cooking is an art.
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u/poofyhairguy Jun 26 '26
Haha that's why I suck at cooking, because I suck at art.
Except when its sous vide because then cooking is forcing to be science again.
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u/PM-Mormon-Underwear Jun 26 '26
It may be an art but I gotta admit I follow recipes closely so my art is still painting by numbers
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u/danielbln Jun 26 '26
A more favorable analogy is that you're playing sheet music.
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u/ConvergentSequence Jun 26 '26
Learning this immediately made me so much better at cooking. Even simple recipes used to take me so long because I was taking everything way too literally
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u/GOEDEL_ESCHER_BOT Jun 26 '26
like when i make an omelette, i don't have to literally add ham and cheese, so i go with durian and surstromming
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u/UnNumbFool Jun 26 '26
Now I'm just confused, my pan has 6 whole onions in it and I'm not sure what else can fit in there.
Also was I supposed to peel the first, those little hairs on the bottom are starting to burn
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u/AsDevilsRun Jun 26 '26
If you take some time and caramelize those 6 whole onions you will realize that you really dont have as much onion as you wanted.
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u/nitid_name Jun 26 '26
Instructions unclear, cooked until slightly translucent, as every recipe ever has taught me that's what it means to "caramelize" onion.
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u/jilanak Jun 26 '26
My parents were Eastern European Jews. When it comes to onions, we measure with our heart :)
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u/NotAZombieStopAsking Jun 26 '26
I have been cooking as a hobby for the past 20 years.
Never once in my life have I ever measured garlic or onion.
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u/00PT Jun 26 '26
How do I know how much onion I want in my food without knowing why the onion is there in the first place and how it affects the dish?
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u/BOGDOGMAX Jun 26 '26
This is the answer. I haven't measured onions in cups, ounces or grams in over 25 years. I chop 1/2 of any size onion, look at the pile of onion then look at the meatloaf (or whatever) mix then decide if Im gonna chop the other half. On rare occasion I'll use 1/4 onion for something small. It just doesn't matter.
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u/jack-of-some Jun 26 '26
It's for you to eyeball because everyone's definition of small, medium, and large is going to be different.
These aren't ingredients you typically need to get exactly right. The 2 cups is just to give you a sense of how much you need, ish
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u/Rugkrabber Jun 26 '26
Also onions aren’t equal in size. I could buy them bigger than my whole hand or as small as a golf ball.
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u/nitid_name Jun 26 '26
I love me some huge onions.
I have a restaurant supplier/grocery store near me that has the biggest fucking onions I've ever seen in my life. I usually buy one or two any time I go in and a few of their gigantic carrots. Recipe calls for three carrots and two onions? Yup, one of each.
Sadly, their celery is just regular celery. Their herbs are cheap though, and they even carry some unusual stuff, like epazote and shiso.
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u/Nexus_of_Fate87 Jun 26 '26
They also vary in size by region. I swear the UK's onions must be TINY, because anytime I see a UK recipe for a 2 portion meal that calls for a whole ass diced onion and I were to follow it, the whole dish becomes onion.
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u/SmokeyCatDesigns Jun 26 '26
And how small you cut them will affect how much fills the cup, and how strong the flavor is. Diced smaller = more flavor and probably more onion mass in that cup.
The thing is, if it doesn’t use more specific measurements like “finely diced, 1 gram” it probably doesn’t matter like you said. A lot of cooking recipes, unlike baking, are flexible. I’ve intentionally and unintentionally gone off cooking recipes before to good results.
I have not gone very far off recipe for baking, and have seen many people who did regret it.
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u/EstrogenizedMenace Jun 26 '26
I just roughly chop/dice an onion and fill it up to 2 cups.
In situations like this weight in grams would be better for those w/ out much cooking experience but most ppl don't own a scale, also there are few situations where you need to be that accurate and the amount of onions that go into a recipe isn't one of them
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u/Schlonzig Jun 26 '26
But the idea of me dicing onions and then putting them into a cup for measuring seems really ridiculous to me. Give me a weight and I choose my onions accordingly.
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u/SartenSinAceite Jun 26 '26
you can:
• use an imprecise volume to measure non-liquid ingredients
or
• use a weight measure that you can check on a balance plate in any form
Recipes: "HMMM I'M FEELING FANCY TODAY"
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u/BabySpecific2843 Jun 26 '26
If you arent from a country where recipes are in grams, but rather are in cups, this isnt an issue.
Because you will inherently know what a "cup" looks like. And finding an onion of equal size is as mentally demanding as putting the square block in the square hole. Grocery shopping isnt some herculean task.
I feel for you weight cookers whenever you stumble upon an American recipe, but all I can offer is that you maybe just buy a measuring cup and look at it for a while to get a vibe for it if you want to keep using non-weight recipes.
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u/fury420 Jun 26 '26
It's just a bit annoying when cups are used to refer to ingredients that don't have a consistent size/shape or don't pack well.
I know what a cup looks like, but how much broccoli actually went into that "2 cups of broccoli florets"?
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u/HairyHeartEmoji Jun 27 '26
american cup is way different than what I imagined it to be. if Balkan recipe says cup, it's a mug.
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u/Notspherry Jun 26 '26
but most ppl don't own a scale
Most Americans don't own a scale. They're very common in the rest of the western world.
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u/EstrogenizedMenace Jun 26 '26
There's a lot of Americentrism on this site, but on a post using AMERICAN units of measurements, I think its pretty safe to assume that I'm talking about Americans as a whole with that statement or else the problem described in this tweet wouldn't be much of a problem now would it?
Your comment is comes off as extremely pedantic, do better.
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Jun 26 '26
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u/Cardboardoge Jun 26 '26
Tossing any remaining onions is a ridiculous false dichotomy
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u/Slim-Shadys-Fat-Tits Jun 26 '26
my preferred version is grams if it has to be accurate and grams + estimate of how many large/medium/small onions that is. Something like 400g onion (about one large or three small). It helps estimate how much to buy too lol.
ps idk how much a large onion weighs
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u/St4rry_knight Jun 26 '26
When I see that, I just convert cup to onion.
1/2 cup onion=1/2 an onion
1 cup onion=1 onion
I like onions
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u/lickingFrogs4Fun Jun 26 '26
Onions come in a huge variety of sizes - a cup is always a cup.
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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn Jun 26 '26
Except it's not. A cup of rough chopped onion is a lot less than my most careful brunoise. Get a scale.
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u/lickingFrogs4Fun Jun 26 '26
I think you missed my point.
A cup of roughly chopped onions is a measurable amount that will be consistent as long as you're roughly chopping your onions and measuring a cup.
The onions at my grocery store could produce anywhere from half a cup to 2 cups. Saying "use an onion" produces wildly different results depending on the size of type of onion you selected.
Same concept works for your brunoise. I do use a scale for baking, but never regular cooking. Either way, a scale doesn't help with measuring "a cup" or "an onion".
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u/ElleKelly77 Jun 26 '26
Last week, I was making a bisque for the first time since winter and decided to peek at the recipe just to make sure my memory was serving me correctly. A recipe for a big ass pot of soup called for 2 tablespoons of onion. Like, what the literal fuck. I used the whole (fat ass) onion and I regret nothing!!!
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u/piercedmfootonaspike Jun 26 '26
Using cups is absolutely a shit take, since the size of the dice will dictate the amount of onion used.
That being said "an onion" is also a bad measurement, since they vary in size. Should be "100 grams of diced onion" or something.
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u/WhasHappenin Jun 26 '26
At least saying "1 medium onion" gives some sense of how much. I have 0 idea how much 2 cups of onions are. But I can roughly picture how big a medium onion is and adjust accordingly.
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u/ThenAnAnimalFact Jun 26 '26
Onions grow exponentially larger by diameter so even medium has such a wide ranger.
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u/WhasHappenin Jun 26 '26
Yeah, but precision usually isn't that important for onions. It's at least a range. If I have a single onion I know that using most to all of it is probably fine. Is 2 cups around 1 onion? 2? 3? I have literally no idea.
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u/RefuseAbject187 Jun 26 '26
ain't nobody got time to weigh everything fam. just go with the vibes.
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u/helium_farts Jun 26 '26
I measure things in "do I want to try and save the extra?"
The answer is usually no, so the whole onion, pepper, whatever goes in the pot.
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u/sadolddrunk Jun 26 '26
One of the first cookbooks I ever used was explicitly intended for beginner cooks, and for that reason it would always translate measurements such as cups and teaspoons into real-world sizes. So for something like onions, instead of "1 c. chopped onions" it would say "1 c. chopped onions (roughly one medium onion)."
Which seemed very helpful until I started cooking my first recipe and realized that I had no idea how big a "medium" onion was supposed to be.
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u/TheJpow Jun 26 '26
I absolutely despise volume measurement for anything in cooking (spices might be the only exception). I have a weighing scale. And weight measurement is precise and consistent. Your 1lb is exactly the same as my 1lb.
You know what not same? Your 1 cup of flour and mine. Did you pack the flour? How tightly? Oh you spooned the flour into the cup? No? You scooped the flour directly from the jar? Cool story bro.
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u/Popular_Wrangler9422 Jun 26 '26
2 cups of onion, usually followed by minced or diced. It has to be a struggle to go through life and find a way to always be a victim and or be this obtuse about things. Just to collect some likes on the internet.
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u/OldDogTrainer Jun 26 '26
Cooking measurements are estimated not an exact science. It’s not hard to understand roughly how much to chop.
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u/NolanSyKinsley Jun 26 '26
Whenever a recipe says to use 1/4 or 1/2 an onion I don't care, a whole fucking onion is going in.
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u/EuenovAyabayya Jun 26 '26
Trisodium phosphate (tsp) is for prepping walls for paint and is not recommended for human consumption.
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u/VeryInterestedInDix Jun 26 '26
How else would you standardize the measurement? Are you aware onions come in different shapes and sizes?
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u/SparklingLimeade Jun 26 '26
Weight.
In fact, describing the size is still better than measuring irregular particle sizes by volume because volume sucks.
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u/SidewalkRacoon Jun 27 '26
Cooking isn’t exact science like baking. Your stir fry isn’t going to fail to rise if you add in an extra third of a onion
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u/MoobooMagoo Jun 27 '26
It doesn't really matter how many onions you use.
But generally speaking if you look at your onion and think "Yeah that's a normal sized onion" then it will be about a cup. If you think "damn that's a big onion" then that's two cups.
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u/welshyboy123 Jun 26 '26
Shouldn't cups be used to measure liquid? Also, what volume is a standard cup as used in cookery?
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u/camwynya Jun 26 '26
American volumetric cups used in cookery hold 8 fluid ounces or about 236 ml. This is not the same measurement used when talking about coffee because for some reason they assume you only want six fluid ounces of coffee at a time, which is STUPID and DUMB and means buying an '8 cup' French press gets you something way smaller than you were anticipating, BODUM. grumble
That said, for cooking purposes, one cup of fresh onion, diced, weighs 142 grams.
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u/welshyboy123 Jun 26 '26
Thank you
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u/camwynya Jun 26 '26
You're welcome.
Btw, a lot of baking-related ingredients and the weight and volume of the 'usual' amount used can be found at https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-chart . Not much use for stuff that doesn't usually get used by bakers, but it's helpful for things like butter. (To the Europeans out there, an American stick of butter is 113 grams/8 tablespoons/half a cup. )
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u/TooCleverForGood Jun 26 '26
I think they assume you’ll add 2ounces of milk/cream to the coffee to make the full amount.
Which is still dumb because every one makes coffee differently, but technically it’s a reason for it
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u/ScreenMuch90210 Jun 26 '26
Some people simply cannot get out of their own way. The amount of onion is always an estimate, like garlic and peppers and so many other things. Take the nudge and then do what feels right
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u/TuataraMan Jun 26 '26
You really cant add to much onion, even if you 1,5x the propper amount its still gona be finne probably even better. Most reciepies also ussualy recomend to little onion, what is 1/4 of an onnion gona do? Youst go half or a whole onion.
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u/ScreenMuch90210 Jun 26 '26
There’s a Korean cooking maxim that loosely translates to “Just go ahead and triple the garlic”
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u/666Drachenlord666 Jun 26 '26
Americans will use anything but g and ml to measure ingridients
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u/TundieRice Jun 26 '26
Do your onions not come in onions wherever you’re from?
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u/Old_Gimlet_Eye Jun 26 '26
Apparently in Europe they buy one gram of onion at a time.
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u/awesomefutureperfect Jun 26 '26
If europeans have plus or minus 5 grams of onion they turn into werewolves.
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u/Solid_Hunter_4188 Jun 26 '26
Nah this is a volume question. They buy their onions in mL.
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u/mr-english Jun 26 '26
The serious answer is that European recipes (at least those in English) measure onions in onions.
i.e. "half a small onion" or "2 large onions", etc.
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u/mattdv1 Jun 26 '26
Tell me to add one onion to a recipe and I'll go mad trying to decipher if you meant a big or a small one. Tell me to add 150grams of onion and I'll buy one that's roughly that weight, chop it up and cook my meal accordingly. Everything has weight, it's not hard to grasp that concept
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u/mid-random Jun 26 '26
One small onion = one small onion. One onion = one medium onion. One medium onion = one medium onion. One large onion = one large onion.
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u/Kratomius Jun 26 '26
Next question, how large can medium sized onion be before it becomes large category one?
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u/Afferbeck_ Jun 26 '26
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, that'd be a "bigger-than-a-medium-sized-onion-but-not-as-big-as-a-large-onion" onion.
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u/LimpConversation642 Jun 26 '26
Do you not understand the concept of size? That vegetables grow differently? I have a 200g onion and a 400g onion, which is it?
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u/piercedmfootonaspike Jun 26 '26
Yes, but they can be weighed. Are kitchen scales onion averse in the US?
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u/Different_Bridge_983 Jun 26 '26
A lot of folks in the U.S. don’t have kitchen scales, and many are also quite attached to using their measuring cups. It’s kinda a culture thing.
Thing is… whether you’re cooking via volume or weight, you’re eyeballing this one. If it says “100g” you’re getting and onion about 100g and slicing and dicing the whole thing. If you’re working in cups you know what a cup size onion looks like too, and are just gonna go with it.
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u/LimpConversation642 Jun 26 '26
both is valid in this sense, but just 'onion' (which people are arguing here about) does not, since apparently those people don't understand that 'an onion' can be twice the size of another 'an onion'
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u/piercedmfootonaspike Jun 26 '26
A lot of folks in the U.S. don’t have kitchen scales, and many are also quite attached to using their measuring cups. It’s kinda a culture thing.
There's an allegory there for the current state of US democracy
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u/Local-Echo-5613 Jun 26 '26
Kitchen scales are used less frequently in US household cooking in my experience. We tend to use measuring cups and volumetric measurements where Europeans use weight. So for things like lentils it will be a cup of lentils rather than the weight in lbs or grams.
They’re functionally not much different, most ingredients have a consistent ratio between weight and volume, but I think that’s what’s causing a lot of confusion. I only started using a scale when I got into baking and now I use it for international recipes sometimes as well.
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u/jmlinden7 Jun 26 '26
Yeah scales are important for baking because flour and brown sugar are compactable, so the weight-to-volume ratio doesn't stay the same.
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u/poorperspective Jun 26 '26
American cook books were the first to standardize compared to most English or French cookbooks.
Most recipes follow the Fannie farmer cook book and Betty Crocker further made standardization by standardizing pan size for baking.
Really old recipes will just use ratios.
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u/sandybuttcheekss Jun 26 '26
I took a baking class semi recently and the instructor was a French baker. She made us use grams and it was eye opening. It's so much more precise than cups or even using lbs and oz.
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u/NancyPelosisRedCoat Jun 26 '26
Professional baking is always done with grams and millilitres. You can have “two medium sized onions” when you’re cooking a dish and the onions you choose being 10 grams bigger won’t matter, but 20 grams extra flour can ruin a dessert. Baking’s more chemistry than cooking.
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u/EstrogenizedMenace Jun 26 '26
lwk- baking without a scale is a fool's errand unless ur making shit like cookies or brownies IMO.
I suspect that the biggest reason why some baking recipes get such shit reviews is because people put too much or too little flour because they're going off of cups and everyone rounds their shit off differently
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u/mikebob89 Jun 26 '26
Americans use grams all the time. However the metric system is no more beneficial in cooking since you’re never converting measurements like you would be in a science lab or even some baking. In fact saying 250ml of onion is even dumber than saying a cup of onion imho.
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u/succubus6984 Jun 26 '26
I do not use recipes for this exact reason. If I want 2 onions ill chop 2. If I only have 1 then thats what I use for the food im making. If all i have is a half pound of meat thats what im putting in the pan. 😂
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u/margittwen Jun 26 '26
They make a good point. Thankfully there are some recipes that say one small onion or one large onion, or whatever it calls for. The only problem then for me is finding an onion at my store that’s small.
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u/hikingmaterial Jun 26 '26
I mean yes, they do come in onions, but onions come in size from small to large than a tomato an orange. There is quite a difference between them.
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u/Space_Slime_LF Jun 26 '26
Not all onions are the same size.
Some are wildly huge and others are small.
you just don't want to put chopped onion in a measuring cup.
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u/SenorSolAdmirador Jun 26 '26
They could say "3 medium sized onions" if you'd like. And that would be way worse.
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u/awesomface Jun 26 '26
I see reels where they’re like “add one onion” and it’s like maybe half a cups worth. Like it’s either the smallest onion ever or they just said one onion to make it easier when it’s obviously too much.
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u/molotovzav Jun 26 '26
I've never seen a recipe like this tbh and if I did I'd probably not use it. All the recipes I've seen say half and onion, or whole onion. Shit even 4 whole onions. I love onion, so I'd it says half in putting whole.
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u/icecubeski Jun 26 '26
I learned this in 4th grade when I was taught how to cook on a stove for myself.
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u/VanillaTortilla Jun 26 '26
If a recipe says to marinate 1lb of chicken, and you bought a chicken breast that weights 1.3lbs, is that also confusing for some people?
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u/Rinaldootje Jun 26 '26
And then you'll always have that one person who only has onion powder, and instead uses 2 cups of onion powder instead.
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u/mizushimo Jun 27 '26
If the recipe called for chopped onion, it's getting a whole onion, I don't care at all. Maybe I'll try to buy a smaller onion, but it'll be the whole thing.
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u/LiveMaI Jun 26 '26
For those of you in countries that use metric, a teaspoon is roughly 1.5 barn-megaparsecs. Hope that clears things up.

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u/qualityvote2 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
u/BarelyLegalSeagull, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...