On 2017-03-29 10:24 AM, Jon Danniken wrote:

>
> I think my main concern here is not knowing what measuring technique an
> individual recipe uses. When I began taking cooking more seriously, I
> read that ingredients such as flour and cocoa need to be spooned and
> leveled, so I adopted that technique whenever I would use them.
>
> Now it is becoming obvious that that is not always the case. Heck, even
> the King Arthur Flour company, in their listing of weight per volume of
> cocoa powder, is off by over 30% compared to weighing out sifted,
> spooned, and leveled cocoa powder! If the difference was within five
> percent I could chalk that up to the weather, but at 30% you might as
> well throw the recipe out the window and use a dart board.
>
> I guess the bottom line is that when I make a recipe, I want to achieve
> a similar result as the original baker, as closely as possible, but
> without knowing which measuring technique the author used, this is
> impossible.
>
> I am starting to realize why professional bakers go by weights when they
> want a consisten result from a recipe, but I wish that amateur bakers
> (AKA people who post recipes on the web) would at least state their
> measuring techniques since they are seemingly unable to abide by a
> single standard of measuring ingredients.
>
> Jon
I agree with what you have written. I weigh and in grams as it's so much
easier to scale a recipe and leads to consistency. However, your comment
about amateur bakers not stating their measuring methods could also be
applied to the book and newspaper publishing world. European books
always measure in grams for dry ingredients and ml for liquids but US
publishers often convert to volume measurements without any regard for
how the cups are to be filled. I always buy the UK editions when I'm
over there. More and more of these books are now "bilingual" showing
both measuring systems - possibly the result of US professional bakers
publishing their recipes using weights.
The local library had a copy of a UK cookbook, obviously bought from a
UK distributor. A copy appeared on the remainder table at mega bookstore
but the recipes had been converted, so it was obviously the U.S.
version. It was cheap so I bought it and copied over the correct
measurements from the library copy.
Graham