In the home kitchen, I think that measuring ingredients by volume is good. I think measuring
ingredients by weight is also good — I could easily make that argument, but everybody makes
that argument these days, don't they? The celebrity chef phenomenon has taken tons of
methods and values from the professional kitchen and it's foisted them upon the home kitchen,
where I think many of those methods have limited applicability. The pros like to measure by
weight. I like to measure by volume. And I have five reasons for that — or possibly
six. We'll get to that. But first we need to establish that this is not a metric versus
imperial debate. All widely used measurement systems in the whole world have units of volume
and units of weight. You totally can measure out 100 milliliters of flour, even though
nobody does that. Most people watching this in the metric world right now would probably
call this about 50 grams of flour.
Likewise, the United States system of customary measurements that evolved here from the British
Imperial system has both weight and volume measurements. We've got them both. I would
call this half a cup of flour, but you could call it about two ounces of flour. The ounce
is a unit of weight — not to be confused with the fluid ounce, which is a unit of volume.
That is legit confusing. A cup is eight fluid ounces. A fluid ounce is the volume that would
be occupied by one ounce of water by weight — roughly that volume — or an ounce of
wine in merry old England. Just a fun, historical fact there. But anyways, yes, it's absolutely
true that people here in the United States are more likely to measure stuff by volume
than, say, our peers over in Europe, who pretty much all have kitchen scales. But that fact
is not inherent to our respective systems of measurement. You can do weight or volume
in either system.
So why is volume still kind of popular here in the States? As far as I can tell, nobody
knows. But here's a hypothesis from Dr. Stephen Mihm, a historian at the University of Georgia
who is working on a book about the history of measurement systems in the U.S.
"In the early 20th century, the federal government created something called the Bureau of Standards.
It fanned out across the country, and it did a bunch of tests on shopkeepers, and restaurants
and places where people were using measures. And, you know — how much does this pint
really measure? And they actually knew how much a pint was supposed to be. And they found
that every single measure almost without exception was off, oftentimes to the detriment of people
buying things at the deli counter or at a grocer."
Twas ever thus, right? There is ample record of merchants in ancient Rome cheating their
customers out of a libra of barley or whatever. Curse you, Aufidius Fortis, I want my silver
quinarii back!
"Measuring by weight is harder to scam as long as you have an authority or a regulator
who calibrates the scales. And measuring by cup or other volumetric measures can be fiddled
with in a variety of very interesting and creative ways that retailers have honed over
millennia. And so, in the United States, the government has been, I would say, a little
less willing to step into that kind of granular regulation, whereas in Europe there's a more
of a tradition there."
That cultural and constitutional resistance to top-down government regulation here in
the U.S. might also explain, at least somewhat, why we are the only major economy in the whole
world that has yet to fully adopt the metric system. For more about that history, see my
earlier video with Dr. Mihm that is linked in the description. It's certainly the case
that measuring by volume is much more technologically simple. Manufacturing a vessel of relatively
uniform size is a lot easier than manufacturing even the most primitive scale. Cheap, mass-produced
scales were not widely available until the turn of the 20th century. It's only around
then that we start to see recipes written by weight in any country.
"If you look at recipes from the early 19th century, they'll say things like, 'Put in
the amount of flour equivalent in size to a large egg.' You know, like, what does that
mean?"
So I wonder if maybe the sudden transition to metric that so many countries went through
in the 20th century — maybe that provided them with an opportunity for a reset. When
you're throwing out your ancient system of measurements, it's not much harder to go a
little bit further and throw out your ancient system of measuring things by volume. And
a scale is only one new piece of gear to buy, as opposed to a whole new set of volume measures.
A scale is one thing to buy. My little hypothesis is that we in the United States, by resisting
metrification, we have denied ourselves the opportunity for that kind of society-wide
reset. And as a result, we're still cooking with methods that were developed by pioneer
ladies who were measuring out the ingredients for their cake with a tea cup, because that's
all the gear they had. And it doesn't even matter because you have died of dysentery.
As we've discussed here previously, Americans have been quietly adopting metric for decades
now — maybe not so much in the kitchen, but in science and in industry. And if you
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up with my link in the description. Thank you, Morning Brew. Anyway, professional kitchens,
especially bakeries, use weight. And when you switch over to weight, it's only natural
to switch over to metric as well, because the ounce is too big for cooking. A single
ounce is almost 30 grams, and 10 or 20 grams of flour can make a real difference in a recipe.
Ounces don't offer you a fine enough scale. And yeah, fractions and decimals exist, but
whole numbers are easier to read, and so American bakers have been switching to metric for many
decades now.
Metric weights are better for cooking. I wouldn't dispute that. And my argument here is not
against metric. It has nothing to do with metric. My argument is in favor of measuring
stuff in the kitchen with volume, regardless of what units you use. And here's reason number
one: Volume is visible, weight is not. We feel weight with our sense of touch. We cannot
see weight. What we see is the volume of space that the item takes up. You might think you
know what 200 grams of cheese looks like, but you don't. What you have is an association.
You know from experience how much space a 200 gram block of cheese generally occupies
and you're doing a volume-to-weight conversion in your head when you look at it and you think,
'Oh, that looks like about 200 grams of cheese to me.'
This does not have to be your goal, but my goal in the kitchen is to measure things as
little as possible. I think it's a lot quicker, and easier and more fun to just eyeball stuff.
A little bit of this, a little bit of that. And I think that human beings are just much
more naturally suited to judging kitchen-type quantities by eye, rather than by feel of
weight. So if you want to cook by eye, I think it makes more sense to just stay in the world
of volume most of the time, rather than doing volume-to-weight conversions in your head.
One reason why professional kitchens like to work with weights is that the pros are
dealing with huge quantities. It's really, really hard to intuitively tell the difference
between this and this by eye, whereas like, it's pretty easy to tell the difference between
like this and this by eye. Down here — this is the scale of objects that evolution has
calibrated our sensory apparatus to judge, things in this kind of range. And this is
the range that we're normally dealing with in the kitchen. Reason, number two I like
volume: You've gotta scoop your stuff out with something — you might as well scoop
it out with something that gives you a rough idea of how much you have scooped. I mean,
I know people who cook with scales sometimes do this thing where they hold the whole flour
container over the bowl and just pour it in. But I think that's a pain. You got to do it
slowly to be careful. And if you're not careful, you can easily start an avalanche, and then
foomp. I think it's easier to scoop out flour with some kind of cup, and to scoop out things
like baking powder with some kind of spoon. You might as well do it with a cup or a spoon,
which helps you judge how much you have scooped.
This leads me to reason number three: Measuring by volume minimizes dishes, or at least it
can help you minimize dishes. To measure by weight, you often have to get a whole big
bowl dirty. You need a bowl on the scale. And that bowl is dishes-neutral if you're
also mixing the food in that bowl. But say you're mixing your stuff in a stand mixer
— you can't just put that on a scale while it's in the machine. Sure, if you need to
add something in halfway-through your mixing process, you could take it off the machine
and then put it back on the scale. But I think it's easier to just leave it in the machine
and simply scoop in whatever you need to add, and to scoop it with a scooper that helps
you keep track of how much you have added. And if you're mixing your stuff in a pot,
you can't just take the pot off the heat and put it on your scale or you're going to melt
your scale.
What you're going to do is you're going to measure your stuff in a bowl on the scale,
which is going to make that bowl dirty, and bowls take up more space in the dishwasher
than a measuring cup or a spoon. Now, to be sure, measuring by volume can definitely create
way more dirty dishes if you get out a different cup or a different spoon for every darn quantity
that you're measuring, so don't do that. I try to cook with exactly one cup and one spoon.
That's it. If I need half a cup of flour, I just fill the cup up halfway. That's easy
to do because volume is visible. And if I need a quarter of a teaspoon of yeast, I just
fill the spoon up a quarter of the way, which leads us to reason number four: Volume is
actually much more accurate with very small quantities.
Like, a quarter of a teaspoon of dry yeast is about 0.75 grams. Kitchen scales usually
don't show fractions of a gram because they're not accurate with weights so light. Helen
Rennie has a terrific video about this topic. It is linked in the description. Normal kitchen
scales are accurate enough when you're talking about tens of grams, but just one or two grams?
Just try measuring out three grams of salt. You'll see the scale suddenly jump. You're
telling me that last grain of salt weighed a whole two grams? Of course not. For ingredients
like flour and cheese, the difference of a gram or two almost never really matters in
the kitchen, but for ingredients like salt, or yeast, or a really strong spice, a difference
that small really could matter, and volume is better at accurately measuring those things.
But don't take my word for it.
Nobody can accuse our friend Kenji of being an imprecise cook. The dude loves precision.
And as he explains in this article that is linked in the description, he uses weight
to measure big quantities and volume to measure very small quantities. This is one reason
why spoons and dashes and pinches persist in recipes, even in places where people are
really accustomed to using kitchen scales. Look at this BBC bread recipe. The flour is
given in grams, but the salt is given in teaspoons. The only reason they give the yeast in grams
is because the yeast comes pre-measured — seven grams is how much these envelopes hold. Unless
you have a scale that is designed to measure fractions of a gram — scales that are often
marketed as jeweler's scales, regardless of what substances people actually weigh on them
— unless you have one of those, volume is more accurate than weight for very small quantities.
Which is not to say that volume is totally accurate either. A teaspoon of salt can be
a very different quantity depending on the size and shape of the grains. This is why
you can't just go by the recipe. You've got to taste your food. Put in a little salt,
taste it, add more salt if it needs it. This leads me to my fifth and final reason: Measuring
by volume encourages you to think for yourself. I am skating on very thin ice right now, I
realized that. I'm speaking purely from my own anecdotal experience. And I'm theorizing
— I'm guessing from my own anecdotal experience. But this is what I will tell you. I know that
about half of you — about half of my audience are here are in the United States, where volume
is still king in the kitchen. And I also know that most times when I get a DM from somebody
who's having trouble with one of my recipes, usually what they're having trouble with is
the quantity of flour in one of my recipes.
Most of those people in those DMs that I get express their problem to me in grams, and
most of their problems have to do with them following my recipe to the letter, instead
of doing what I said to do, which is to use the recipe or the quantity in the recipe as
a baseline, and then add more flour until it feels right. This is pretty much always
the advice I offer. Just use the measurement as a starting point, and then keep putting
in flour until it looks and feels the way that it's supposed to. And one of the beauties
of teaching cooking through a medium like video is I can show you what it looks like.
I think — I'm guessing based upon this experience — that gram recipes might encourage robotic
thinking, a kind of paint-by-numbers mentality. 'This recipe has super-precise measurements,
so all I gotta do is just follow it to the dot and I'm going to have a great dinner.'
Problem is it doesn't work that way.
For those of us in the cups and spoons world, we're maybe a little more used to measurement
alone being inadequate, for flour in particular. A cup of flour is a really different quantity
depending on whether the flour is compressed or fluffed up. So, because I grew up in the
cups and spoons world, maybe I'm just a little bit more used to using the quantities in the
recipe as a baseline, and then using feel and judgment to take it the rest of the way.
If you measure your flour by grams, you're more likely to get away with just cooking
by measurement and never using your own senses or judgment, but there can still be problems.
50 grams of flour will absorb more or less water depending on what kind of flour it is,
its protein content, whether it's been bleached, how finely it's been milled. When professional
kitchens use weight, they're generally working from a recipe that has been written by a chef
in-house, right?
And that chef knows exactly what kind of flour they're working with. That chef knows exactly
how that oven they have there behaves. The test cooks at the BBC don't know about your
flour, or your oven, or how salty you like your bread. We all have to think for ourselves
in our kitchens. I'm hypothesizing that if you resign yourself to using a more imprecise
measure, like a cup to measure flour, then you're more likely to use your head and your
hands instead, instead of just following the recipe like a drone. But I realize that the
argument I just made is in conflict with the argument I made for reason number four. Sorry
about that. If you're in school right now for sociology, or psychology, or cognition,
or maybe even like technical communication, I think that you could devise an experiment
to test this hypothesis.
You give one group of cooks a recipe with really specific quantities to the gram and
you give them a scale to cook it with, and then you give the other group a recipe with
really kind of vague quantities on it and no scale, but a recipe that gives really specific
verbiage about what the thing should look like. And then you just see who has a better
experience — whose product comes out closer to the ideal model. Lastly, as I mentioned
at the top, there may be a secret sixth reason why I like volume: I was born into volume.
I was born into the world of cups and spoons. Cups and spoons is who I am. And I like myself.
I know myself. I'm comfortable with myself. I don't know other people. I'm not comfortable
with them. I fear the unknown, and the world of grams is the unknown. It's not who I am.
Maybe that's why I like volume.
There's a lot of people in this world who believed that one culture is objectively superior
to another culture. And maybe they're right — I don't know. I just know that it's kind
of a remarkable coincidence that so many of these people — in fact, I'd say most of
these people who believe that there is one objectively superior culture — just happen
to have been born into that culture. I mean, what are the odds? How lucky for you! All
of us have a very limited understanding of why we like what we like. Luckily we don't
really have to understand it, especially here in the kitchen where the stakes are pretty
darn low. Make your dinner however you like it. This is why I like measuring things by
volume. Take from that what you will.