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Why do Americans measure everything in cups?
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Cups is a volumetric measurement. Honestly I'd be fine with switching to liters for measurements, or deciliters or whatever makes sense. Gravimetric measurements never made intuitive sense to me.
Perhaps that's because it's what you know best and are used to. Volumetric measurements of anything that doesn't have a fixed density make no sense to me. What the hell is one cup of broccoli? Even a cup of flour can have wildly different ammounts of flour. My least favorite though is butter, how the hell am I supposed to measure out 3 tablespoons of butter? Melt it all on the stove and pour out what I need? I find it incredibly unintuitive.
In the US, sticks of butter have tablespoon measurements printed on the label, like this: https://www.errenskitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/butter-sticks.jpg
Most people leave the sticks of butter in the fridge with the wrappers on. If you want X tablespoons of butter, you cut through the wrapper and butter at the right mark.
I'm not saying it's an ideal system (I also prefer recipes that use weights) but it works.
How does this confuse you? Get a measuring cup, scoop up brocoli. If it's a large, whole broccoli, the recipe will say that.
Adding an extra step to weigh everything is stupid.
You keep saying that, but it's not an extra step. Weighing the food is in place of the volume measurement, not in addition.
Using volume measurement: start cutting broccoli. Add to a measuring cup until you get the right amount.
Using weight measurement: cut broccoli. Add to scale until you have the right amount (actually I would usually weigh out a single large piece, then chop it all at once - same amount of effort).
How do you transfer the food from the cutting board to the scale?
How do you transfer the food from the cutting board to the measuring cup?
You put it in the cup. Which also measures it. You don't have to press any buttons or tare anything. You just keep adding broccoli until cup is full.
Put empty cutting board on scale. Press tare. Put broccoli on cutting board. There you go, you have just measured the weight of broccoli without taking it off the cutting board. You can’t do that with a cup.
You don't NEED to do all that with a cup. You know how you measure a cup of brocoli? You put it in the damn cup. You don't need to move the broccoli off the cutting board or tare your cutting board before cutting or even press any buttons. Take broccoli, add to cup. Stop when cup is full.
I brought up broccoli specifically because I recently wanted to know the nutrition facts of broccoli, and the initial google results were for 1 cup, and not 100g as is standard in I guess everywhere that uses metric. I have absolutely no idea how much broccoli that is, not only because I'm not used to it, but the dimensions of the cup and how finely chopped the broccoli is matter quite a lot in terms of how much actual broccoli we're talking about. It's just so ambiguous.
And the volume of butter changes a lot when melted. If thé recipe dont precise the form, you'll need multiple try juste to know if you recipe actually works.