I read John Steele's USMA:50206 and I share his frustration. Some recipe
sources are better than others. One of the better websites for metric
recipes is allrecipes.com which provides a "metric conversion" button.
On this site, all fluids are given in milliliters and solids in grams,
it seems.
Some time ago I mentioned a book on bread baking that I purchased, in
which the author made much the same point about measuring by mass, not
by volume, and he sounded quite fond of the metric system. He provided
three versions of each recipe: individual home baking, bakery production
in non-metric, and bakery production in metric. Sure wish he had
included the metric measures on the home baking recipe, but at least I
can readily scale down.
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/bread-a-bakers-book-of-techniques-and-recipes-cookbook
This is an excellent book, perhaps the best technical and yet easily
understandable book on bread baking that I have come across. (My wife
and I own hundreds of cookbooks!) By comparison to Jeffrey Hamelman,
James Beard was an amateur.
Here's a challah recipe that has intrigued me; I think I'll be trying it
out in a few days. The author provides ingredient volumes with
ingredient masses in parentheses (even for fluids), both metric and
non-metric. I was delighted to see the metric, of course, but also noted
with pleasure that she placed zeros before the decimal mark where the
numerical portion of the quantity value was less than one. The
prevalence of "nekkid zeros", as I described them to my physics students
in times gone by, really irritates me!
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/My-Challah-235867
By the way, this author must be British; she gives "gas marks" for oven
settings as well as temperatures in Fahrenheit and in Celsius.
Jim
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
