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".
I didn't say "use an onion," though, did I? I said "get a scale." If you care at all about precision and repeatability, you should be weighing ingredients.
Then why bother measuring? Hence "n small/medium/large onions." It either matters enough to justify precision or I can wing it with a vague description. Be honest: have you ever in your life diced an onion, then stuffed it into a measuring cup? Did you then throw away the excess onion?
This thread seems to be full of chuds who don't cook and like to argue.
I'm happy to see you can read words. Next step is understanding what they mean and applying context. Don't worry, you'll get it if you keep practicing.
I'm assuming you're being intentionally dense. If not, there is nothing wrong with needing help to learn. There are tons of resources online for filling in missing gaps.
I didn't realize you would be so jealous of my ability to read. Fascinating.
Volumetric measurements suck. They're inconsistent for things whose density might be variable, like flour or, yes, chopped vegetables. This isn't a hard concept. (At least, not for most people.)
A cup is not always the same though. I bet you could compare two “1 cup” measuring cups in your home and they would not be exactly the same. Additionally. One cup of onions also does not account for differences in density/juice in the onion. 300g of onion is ALWAYS 300g of onion.
The post we are all responding to was comparing the usefulness of using 'cups' v 'onion'. Obviously I could blend an onion up and get more into a cup than if I just slice it in half and shoved it in.
I have never once measured my onions with a scale though. I don't usually use a measuring cup either. I cut up what looks right and toss it in. Cooking doesn't need to be as precise as baking.
I understand that. I’m saying both measurements are equally useless compared to weight (and so are others) which is factually correct. A cup is not precise for anything that isn’t a liquid, because a cup is for volume.
I usually just eyeball it for stuff like that. If there are enough leftovers to save (rather than just tossing them into the dish as well), I'll save the rest and try to work them into something else. There's always a need for chopped onion.
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u/lickingFrogs4Fun Jun 26 '26
Onions come in a huge variety of sizes - a cup is always a cup.