Weight to Volume App

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.