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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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even in the metric system, measuring by mass is better than volume and most home bakers don't do it
You can and actually do every measurement of a recipe expressed in metric by mass, especially when it comes to bread and pastry and even more for fine pastry.
Even for liquids it is extremely easy to convert volume into mass because 1ml = 1g (for water), which facilitates converting any volume of any liquid into mass.
Even eggs, butter or even olive oil can be easily measured by weight.
So, even if you were to get a recipe expressed in tons for each ingredient, it would be possible to convert it to a homemade recipe by just converting to grams and weigh the required ingredients.
The problem with measuring by volume isn't that math is hard. The problem is that you can get surprisingly inconsistent amounts of things. Tiny differences in how you measure can make a huge difference in how much air you have mixed into your dry ingredients. Measuring ingredients by weight doesn't have that problem.
You made me go and review why I had intervened in the thread.
Yes, you are correct. Volume is an extremely imprecise measure for dry ingredients and it was because of that I commented as I did, as the discussion was as commercial baking/cooking revolved around large batches, measured by weight, while family cooking/baking revolves around measurements by volume.
But you get hard pressed to have that problem in recipes expressed in metric, even if we went and tried our best to make matters as complicated as possible and measured liquids by mass.
That was why a I replied as I did.
That's a fair point, but I think you're overestimating how difficult it is to convert units in less rational measurement systems. People who've used metric their whole lives seem to have it stuck in their heads that it's some kind of herculean task to look up a couple numbers and plug them into a calculator and then write that number down for your recipe. If it was as hard as you seem to think it is even America would have changed over by now. Metric is better, but it's not that much better.
Biased as I am, if for nothing else, metric uses a decimal base, which facilitates converting between scale units by shifting the point. The representation by fractions used in the imperial system is not that straighforward.
But I wasn't even considering that in my comment. The point was what you ilustrated very well in you comment: measuring dry ingredients by volume can and will cause deviation in the end result.
I can't fathom what "one cup, hard packed" means. What if I'm stronger than the original author of the recipe and pack it harder or my dry is coarser or has a different moisture content?
But I can easily understand what half a pound, half and one quarter, etc, precisely requests, although I prefer to have it expressed in metric units as 1lb = 453g, so 1 and 1/2lb is 679,5g, out of personal preference.