On Sun, 28 Sep 2003 20:49:31 John S. Ward wrote: >Marcus, > >It's funny how two people doing the same thing have such different >experiences. I just looked through all 9 of our European cookbooks (6 >French, 3 British.) Not a single one specifies spices by weight. Most use >teaspoons, tablespoons, coffee spoons, or soup spoons, although a few specify >pinches or ml. I believe the various spoons are defined as 5 or 15 ml. > >What country is your cookbook from that gives spices by the gram? > I'll give you just one that I remember from the top of my head: Pat Chapman's Curry Bible. BTW, an absolutely outstanding book on Indian cuisine! :-)
>I concede that cooking by weight can only work as well as your scales. I >won't claim my cheap electronic scales are particularly accurate, but several >times I've done the experiment of weighing the same thing several times. Up >to about 800 g, it varies over a range of 4 g at the most, usually not more >than 2. Above that, it varies over a range of 5 g. I think the smallest >thing I ever had to weigh was 15 g of butter, which worked fine. It makes no >difference how I dump the ingredients into the bowl. > I see no problem between your experience described above and mine. They both even coincide actually... However, try the same experiment I did with very minute quantities. I doubt you'll be able to find volume consistency there! Masses in excess of 15 g may indeed not suffer of the kind of problem I was describing, especially if you do the "pouring" in one "lump" (like you did with the butter). ... >If you want to measure dry ingredients by volume, how would you do it? If a >recipe called for 140 g of some ingredient, and gave the equivalent volume as >180 ml, what would you do? >... ? I'm not sure I understood the nature of your question, John. Provided the thing is "powdery" I simply pour it in a container to the amount indicated (evidently if we're talking about the hideous teaspoon, tablespoon... crap that would mean a small spoonlike device). If I were to choose between 140 g and 180 ml I may choose the latter. Certainly if that one were liquid. If I sense the density of the stuff is high enough (near or above the water's) I may venture use the scale, if not, again, I'd favor the volume container. On the other hand there is the issue of whether or not I can easily "read" the value. 180 is not a very good number to read from a cup container, for instance. Therefore, I may choose the scale for that after all. I hope I was able to answer your question as you expected. Marcus ____________________________________________________________ Get 25MB of email storage with Lycos Mail Plus! Sign up today -- http://www.mail.lycos.com/brandPage.shtml?pageId=plus
