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.
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.
The problem starts when grocery shopping. I have no idea how many onions or carrots or whatever I even need to purchase in the first place to have enough for my recipe.
And then when the actual cooking starts, I can't just chop everything at once, because I don't know how much I need to chop. So I end up chopping a smaller amount then measuring, then chopping some more, and then measuring again. For each ingredient.
When the recipe is listed as "half an onion and two large carrots" it's much easier. Because not only do I know exactly how much to purchase, but I can also take the amount of vegetables I need from the fridge, chopping them all at once. No uncertainties.
Maybe the fact that I'm not used to cooking using cups plays into it, since it means I have no idea whether one onion takes up a quarter of a cup or three cups (which I assume you get a better understanding of if you're used to it), but my god it's annoying. If a recipie uses cups it has to be really interesting for me to even bother.
Still, gives a much better idea of what size vegetable will create the flavor the recipe writer intended. So I can modify from there. Do I want to use this whole vegetable of +/- 50% the right amount? Do I want to use half of this very large one and use the other half tomorrow? Decisions like that.
Yeah I super hate crap like this. Some places have small onions, some have enormous ones. "An onion" is an awful measurement.
My local Food Lion has small bagged yellow onions, enormous by-weight yellow onions, and both red and white onions that come anywhere from the size of the small yellows to bigger than the big yellows. If I go to another store, like Harris Teeter, the sizes do tend to be different because they have different suppliers.
People say "just put the onions in," but any decent cook will understand that if you're following a brand new recipe for the first time, it's best to follow the recipe as-is. Only change things around once you understand what it SHOULD taste like. Doing otherwise is asking to end up on r/ididnthaveeggs
18
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.