Baking “Conversions” Gone Wrong
I pretty much believe the internet is full of great recipes to try, but the world of American volume-based recipes using cups and “sticks” of butter just doesn’t work in the UK. I end up poking anxiously with floury hands on my laptop trying to check whether a teaspoon is a teaspoon is a teaspoon. Well, NO MORE. I am coming up with a definitive cheat sheet for the fridge, but it is NOT HELPED by finding ridiculous sites like the above which claims the UK equivalent to 1 US “cup” is “3/4 of a cup and 2 dsp”. Leaving aside the fact that I am British and am not quite sure of the difference between a desertspoon and a teaspoon (the REALLY weeny spoons, I guess?) – NO! UK measurements do not involve cups! They involve weights, in grams, or at a PUSH I can accept pounds and ounces in old money. What NONSENSE is this site claiming?!
Or if anyone would like to say that the UK started it with Pints and Imperial Pints and I am just thick, they are welcome to Try It, but frankly – weight based measurements are the way to go. I mean, even if you DO measure by volume, a cup of flour is different to a cup of WALNUTS or whatever. The standard in the UK is metric, I just find it downright bizarre have NO clue what that site is referencing. I now judge it: UNHELPFUL! And my cheatsheet is back at square one as how can I trust anything else on that site?
And speaking of which, where can I buy a set of balance scales from these days? Are they the sort of things found in Past Tymes stores and bought by Live Roleplaying Enthusiasts? (Sorry Tom).
Sarah in FT /Pumpkin Publog • Food • 934 views
Sarah, if you do finish the cheatsheet, do please post here, since I am forever finding this a chore. The different-names-for-different-things issue crops up occasionally, hence the horribleness of a recipe that called for my prawns to be dipped in cornflour . . .
I will! I’ve done about half of one already: I’ve put the basic conversion basis at the top (ie what you multiply by to convert ounces to grams and so on), then what is a cup of butter, what is a stick and what that means in real life talk. The thing is, because the weight measurements for different things in cups are SO DAMN STRANGE, it’s almost worth just not thinking about it and just using a set of cups because the discrepancy in any chart is just huge! I’m lucky that US flatmate has a set of measuring cups handy as srsly, converting them with any accuracy = big b0ttom pain.
The cornflour thing doesn’t seem so bad… were you making a tempura batter or something?
That site implies a UK cup is 24 dessertspoons. A US cup is a puny 20 dessertspoons.
This is like the weeny US pint vs the massive hardcore UK pint all over again.
Extra special confusing fact: according to my measuring cup thing what I got for 100 yen, the Japanese ‘cup’ is equivalent to 200ml of liquid, but I’m fairly sure a US cup is more like 235ml. (My basic rule-of-eye says a US cup is somewhere between the lines for 225ml and 250ml, not really too fussed where.) And isn’t a stick of butter basically 4oz i.e. half a 225g packet?
basically what I’m saying is: I don’t even use proper sized spoons any more! I just pick a random teaspoon and assume that three of those will make a tablespoon.
To make things more confusing, dry cups and wet cups are different volumes, though I’ve never known what the difference is, or cared, though I think they’re pretty close.
But most recipes don’t need to be that precise, and I doubt that a recipe that calls for an eighth of a teaspoon of turmeric, say, needs it to be exactly one eighth and not three-sixteenths or one-sixteenth. In any event, from the looks of it the difference between your cup and your teaspoon is proportional to the difference between our cup and our teaspoon, so if you just use variations on your cups and your teaspoons you can just use your own cups and teaspoons and you’ll end up making a little more, and put in 1/2 kilo whenever it calls for an American pound (which is a bit less than half a kilo), so you’ll end up making a little more than we’d make. (So the reason Nigel Tufnel needed to turn up to 11 was that he was using American-made equipment and he didn’t realize that an American 10 was only about a British nine and one-eighth.) A U.S. cup is a little under 250 ml. A British cup would be about 325 ml, I’m guessing, though you might know that better than I.
(Not sure that tablespoons are proportional – in fact, it looks like the U.S. and the Brit tablespoon are about the same. In the U.S. three teaspoons make a tablespoon so if you want to keep things proportional just use three teaspoons whenever it says tablespoon.)
A stick of butter is a quarter pound (so a bit less than an eighth of a kilogram), and there are eight tablespoons in a stick, so each tablespoon of butter is about 14 grams.
baking needs to be exact!
(when it says cup i just use whichever of my coffee mugs is to hand and clean) (this however means abt one cake in four totally fails to work for me, and either burns or doesn’t set)
(i experiment a LOT with amounts viz “is it nice? then try it with double the butter!” i created my legendary cheesy blobs this way, tho the year i used EIGHT TIMES the amount of butter called for in the original book recipe they reached critical mass and turned into an explosive nuclear event)
I don’t think anyone really bothers with teaspoon/tablespoon measurements in a serious sense, do they? I mean, in the sense of buying specific measuring spoons. I don’t see the point – if you need 1/4 of a teaspoon of something, fill up yr teaspoon to 1/4 (and then add more anyway because 1/4 of a teaspoon whut, why even bother)! And a tablespoon is a tablespoon is a tablespoon.
Teaspoons are incredibly varied in size anyway: our teeny-tiny Little My teaspoon and the whopper Lytton favours for his morning weetabix would have significantly different impacts on any recipe.
Lytton’s “spoon”, yesterday:
I bet this img thing won’t work…
EFF. I knew it. ANYWAY I was insinuating some sort of JCB with a hiiiilarious digger picture. Ha ha. WIT.
Believe me if he was allowed to use his toy digger to eat with he would do nothing else.