LLike most Americans, Samin Nosrat grew up in a home with a cup measure in the kitchen. However, you don’t always get used to it. “Her mother taught me in a more ‘old-fashioned’ way,” she says. For example, measuring the amount of water to cover the rice with her knuckles. Nosrat, the author of her cookbook “Salt Fat Acid Heat” and host of the Netflix show of the same name, has built a career on what she calls “sensory-guided cooking.” It helps home cooks develop their cooking instincts by understanding the behavior of ingredients. As such, he admits he has a “somewhat fraught relationship with measurement.” But the recipe writer describes herself as “nervous.” “If you’re trying to write clear and effective recipes, it makes sense to use a scale,” says Nosrat. She has 3 sets. ”
There is a gulf between European and American kitchen culture. The fundamental difference is that Americans use volume rather than weight for measurements in the kitchen. Cooking with cups is quantity-based and relies heavily on visual cues. We all know what a cup of granulated sugar looks like. The metric system is based on weight, but not as much as 200g or 7.1 oz. “The problem isn’t that Americans measure things differently,” says Sarah Chamberlain, an author who Americanizes British cookbooks for the American market. “Most of them just don’t consider things at all.”
Most American homes don’t have scales, agrees Claire Ptak, a Californian pastry chef based in London who created Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s wedding cake. Ptak is the author of three of his cookbooks and has been campaigning for years to encourage American readers to invest in scales. Her own mother just bought this set for her daughter, even though she has been a professional baker for over 20 years.
“I realized how narcissistic it was for us here in the U.S. to insist on the cup method when the rest of the world cooks differently,” Nosrat said. say. She likens the conversion between cup and metric measurements to translation. Actual languages are culture-specific, and their origins date back thousands of years.but [the language of cups] It’s very arbitrary. ”
All of this has a huge emotional component that cannot be underestimated. Professional bakers and Europeans can tout the banner of using scales and the metric system as much as they like, but what about those who just want to use cups? For cooks, it can have fundamental implications, even tribal ones. Mr Chamberlain says: “It’s telling someone that what they were programmed to do in the first place was wrong.” Additionally, cup measuring sets can be passed down through generations, many from family members who no longer exist. Considering the fact that I learned to cook this way, you can understand why this issue is so emotional.
Although Chamberlain describes himself as a “bilingual chef,” he prefers to weigh using the metric system. “Because it’s easier to multiply and divide numbers.” Food experts generally seem to prefer grams and milligrams to cups for accuracy.Famous American baker and author of 14 cookbooks dorie greenspan We now develop all recipes in metric units and our testers calculate in cups. The resulting book is published in double measure. Greenspan says it took a lot of time to convince publishers. “Publishers were worried that American readers would be scared of metric measurements.” Nosrat, on the other hand, is known for packing a digital scale in her suitcase when she travels.
For those compiling recipes for audiences on both sides of this transatlantic divide, cups are tricky territory.Conversion to metric (or any) weight depends on an almost infinite number of variables, from the material you’re measuring (for example, 1 cup of flour weighs much less than 1 cup of brown sugar) to the material category. (1 cup unrefined brown sugar is heavier than caster sugar, for example) [superfine] Sugar) – How tightly or loosely the ingredients are packed into the cup. It also depends on your own specific set of cups. Chamberlain’s cups are beautifully round and smooth and easy to empty, but “getting things out at the bottom of a cylindrical cup can be a pain,” she says.
Some materials are more difficult to work with than others. Words like “nightmare” and “headache” broadly apply to flour.According to Greenspan, “If you weigh a cup of flour 10 times, you will get different measurements.There are many different types of flour, but if the flour is old, dry, or damp, I always let air into the flour bowl before scooping and sweeping. [or level it off]. My cup of flour is 136g. King Arthur baking yields 120g. Some of them reach 150g. ”This kind of discrepancy can lead to very different results, especially if you scale up the recipe four times as much as he did. “A few grams difference in one batch doesn’t make much of a difference,” Ptak says, but when he quadruples the recipe, small differences in the definition of cup volume become very significant. says Lara Hamilton, owner of Seattle cooking bookstore Book Larder. “This may be the difference between a moist, fluffy cake and a dry, dense cake.”
Other problematic ingredients include fresh herbs. That’s because, Chamberlain explains, they’re difficult to determine because they’re light and may contain stems, leaves, or both. Measuring something sticky in a cup is also a hassle, she says. “Peanut butter, molasses, honey…the trick is to grease the cup before adding anything sticky. Here’s the great thing about Grams: Just toss the sticky stuff into the bowl on the scale. And of course, you’ll save on washing. “If you use a cup for molasses and then need to use it for flour, you have to stop everything to clean it,” says Nosrat. The scale keeps me so sane! ”
When I was little, my mom had a cast-iron scale and would add weights to one side and dry ingredients to the brass bowl on the other until she got the perfect balance. I then added one of each to a separate bowl. It was romantic, but tedious. She remembers the day her mother bought a digital scale and how it changed things. Suddenly, she was measuring out all the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet ingredients in another, mixing the two together, and having a cake in the oven in minutes. Most people who get a digital scale never seem to look back. Greenspan says: “I don’t see the benefit of the cup anymore other than comfort. Whether that’s how you learned it or your mother or grandmother did it.”
Are the trends in the United States changing? Lara Hamilton isn’t convinced that Americans are being turned into scales, but at Book Larder she buys imported European cookbooks rather than waiting for the U.S. version with a cup measure. I’ve noticed that more people are buying books from Book Larder. Nosrat waxes lyrical about her scales in her next book, which she said is her dream to contribute to a “game change” in American cuisine.
Everyone agrees that scale makes the biggest difference for bread recipes and bakers.Mr. Ptak was the pastry chef at the Alice Waters facility in Berkeley. Chez Panisse Until 2005, he says, and that’s when restaurants stopped using cups for all desserts. She quit Chez Panisse and headed to London, where it was rare to find a restaurant with its own pastry chef. Improving awareness in the kitchen – river cafe When Ptak worked there, there was no staff dedicated to pastry, but now that section has about 20 people. this is, sex in the city And in 2010, great british bake off (aka The Great British Baking Show in the US). Suddenly, sales of stand mixers, cupcake trays, and digital scales skyrocketed.
Gail Simmons is a chef and TV personality with a hit show. best chef I agree that home cooks have become more knowledgeable and detail-oriented than ever before, thanks to television and social media. But, she added, “people like to think of food as improvisational.” Does using a scale undermine the idea that cooking can be done with talent or natural intuition? “I always think that if you have the basics, if you know proportions, substitutions, and the behavior of ingredients, , says Simmons can improvise dishes. “And the only way to get them is to follow the recipe exactly: with a scale!”
How do you publish recipes in the Guardian? As a British publication with a global audience and a roster of primarily British chef contributors, we provide weights in grams. , often simplifying, for example, 500 grams of courgettes (zucchini) to 3 medium-sized pieces. Also, for smaller measurements, I follow the American model and prefer 1 teaspoon for every 6g of salt and 1 tablespoon for every 20g of maple syrup. Still, Simmons says, our recipe’s “one lemon,” “pinch of parsley,” and “pinch of salt” are “much more casual than American recipes.”
What they all have in common is simplicity. If you make something out of habit or nostalgia, it may also mean a cup. On weekends, Ptak makes breakfast pancakes in a cup for her daughter. Simmons makes bread pudding by heart, using 8 to 10 cups of croutons and half a cup of sugar. Nosrat claims he will have three digital scales, but her hardware store favoritesanother With pull-out display Bulk and jewelry scales are primarily used to accurately measure salinity. She still describes herself as a sensory cook. “Taste, taste, taste, that’s where my sensibility comes from,” she says.
