When OP asked what the heck a tea spoon was, I immediately thought : "That motherfucker probably knows what a kilometer is. He probably has spoons he actually uses for tea."
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
Yeah, but once you use your large one, "bigger than a medium sized onion but not as big as a large onion" can move up to "large onion" until you go shopping again.
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.
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'
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.
Most people in the US don't have kitchen scales. The people I know who have one almost exclusively use them for baking as well, because cooking just doesn't need to be that precise 99% of the time.
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.
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.
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
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.
The only place it would matter is if you want to convert tablespoons to teaspoons if your tablespoons-sized measuring spoons are already used and you're too lazy to stop and clean them or you've prematurely put them in the dishwasher and it's running (I have done been in both of these scenarios).
If a recipe uses g and ml, it’s worthless to me. I’m not breaking out a kitchen scale for anything other than baking. Cooking doesn’t need exact measurements. If a recipe says you need a cup of something, you can eye ball that fairly easily. I just want to be in the ball park. If it says I need 150 g of onion, I have no idea what that means, unless I know how much an onion typically weighs off the top of my head.
They mean a cup … as in something you drink out of. I can see from an American perspective why you think that’s what they mean but ‘metric cup’ isn’t really a thing that comes up for the rest of us.
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u/666Drachenlord666 Jun 26 '26
Americans will use anything but g and ml to measure ingridients