When cooking, many choose to follow recipes. Personally, I
prefer the seat-of-the pants make it up as you go along
system, but I understand the appeal. It's also comforting
when cooking a whole new style of food to have reasonable
guidelines.
The problem with recipes, is the multitude of units.
As a
young British chap trying to make american-style pancakes
I was immediately confused by the "cup" as a
measurement. After all, I had at least 8 different sizes of
cup to chose from, surely the USA has variety in their
drinking vessels?
As it turned out, a 'cup" is an actual unit. Half a pint, or
1/16th of a gallon*. It turns out that the US uses volume a
lot more as a measurement in cooking. It's actually pretty
convenient, need a cup of rice, take a 1 cup measure fill,
done. Need 1 cup of water to go with that? use the same
measure. This becomes problematic with recipes that use
weight/mass. 220g butter? Dammit. Now I need to break
out the scales. Or.. load up the volume/weight app, pre
programmed with the densities of all common foodstuffs
and boom: roughly one cup.
To be truly useful, it should be based on actual
measurements. Sure, baby spinach is low density, but say
you're adding 1kg, the stuff at the bottom will pack down,
increasing density. So, measure that, factor it into the
calculations.
Add in other factors, ambient temperature from your smart
thermostat. Ambient pressure from location data &
weather services. There, now to make a phone interface
that works without getting flour all over the screen.
*which is, confusingly, 6.66 English pints or 0.83 English
gallons.