Measurements

I looked through the categories and this seemed the best fit,,,

I was bitten by the bug many years ago; I made my mother inculcate such as she was willing of the mysteries of cooking, back when boys -- and men -- just didn't do that (outside of the professional arena, anyway). On another front, I've been the geek/engineer since early childhood. I get why we all ought to be SI (generally called "metric," though that's only one feature). But we're not.

Cutting to the chase: Mr Grant's insisting that everything be hard metric by weight. Tolerable, I suppose, for dry ingredients, but what in heck is 475 g of milk? or 50 g of olive oil? or (ultimate ridiculous) 200 g of eggs? (Is that last net of the shells? Or of air incorporated in trying to get a uniform substance to be weighed?) I get that the recipes are, in fact, ratio tables, and I can see tailoring the recipe to the key ingredient, generally the protein, but to whatever the eggs happen to weigh? I suppose that I should be grateful that you don't specify temperatures in Kelvins. (Oh, and I did find one ingredient by volume -- water, which is the ONLY ingredient for which grams directly correspond to ml.)

The exalted access is marketed to the Rest of Us(tm). Real Chefs(tm) really weigh every stinkin' thing to the gram? Or maybe they have Somebody Else(tm) to do it for them? Me, I better weigh the apples last, or they're going to get pretty brown by the time I weigh everything else...

I'd like to try the corned beef. I've actually made my own several times, large enough batches to have a couple chunks to move on to pastrami. I have a gold standard; the corned beef here looks very competitive. But the labor just to figure out the ingredients is off-putting.

All is not lost, eg, my lady friend and I agreed that the sous vide burgers were the best burgers we've ever had. (Half-pounders, 118 F, 5 hr, FWIW) I've had a few other successes but the sweet spice crashed and burned on the vanilla beans...)

Any thoughts?

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Comments

Brian_Martin_197578

All weights presented are net measurements. If you can recognize numbers, then you can use the metric system. Get a digital kitchen scale: you can find them for under 20 bucks on amazon, target, Walmart, bed bath and beyond, etc., put your bowl on the scale, tare it out, add the ingredients until the number on the scale matched the number on the recipe, tare the scale, and repeat for all ingredients. Granted, if you're not scaling the ingredients, you might not have exactly the number they present (1 g vs 1.2; 3 g vs 2.8; etc.) but until you're drastically increasing the recipe, the difference in the outcome is negligible.

Some additional information can be found here: https://www.chefsteps.com/forum/posts/grams-to-ounces-to-teaspoons-to-tablespoons

If it really bothers you that much, I would suggest another cooking website. There are plenty of sites out there, who have knowledgeable cooks, who put out recipes that are just fine. If you want to use ChefSteps, you'll either need to convert all of the measurements to something you can use, or you will need to use the measurements provided.

FrankM_3301

It is so much easier than volumetric, US measurements, that I've converted old recipes to metric and mass. Stick a bowl, blender jar, pot, or pan on a scale, and add ingredients. After each ingredient hit "tare" to zero your scale. As I've mentioned before on this site, in the case of something like eggs, a few grams either way is not a big deal. You just have to recognize that and move on. Bonus... I don't have a bunch of cups and spoons to wash.

Two other observations...

There are ways of keeping apples from browning.

I'm trying to figure out which ingredient in the corned beef recipe is so obscure that it can't be found, particularly in this age of online purchasing with near immediate delivery, but if you like your recipe, why would you change it?

Michael_Schmidt_743616

Thanks for the reasoned reply. No problem with ingredients on the corned beef recipe; it was a bad example of a multi-ingredient recipe that might need scaling -- but doesn't.

Browning apples was a joke. Been trying to adopt "mise en place" by pre-measuring ingredients; your most excellent suggestion sidesteps all that. More or less.

To your ultimate question: Corned beef, more so pastrami, is a multi-attribute optimization. One seldom ever finds an ultimate solution to such. But the journey is the spice of life.

Isn't that why we're all here?

Michael_Schmidt_743616

Thanks for the reference; otherwise... if you're not trying to talk me out of renewing my Studio Pass(tm) or the one that I gifted my lady friend, you'd have fooled me.

montebello1964

"But the labor just to figure out the ingredients is off-putting."

As illustrated in this video, the labor involved is actually LESS:

https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/weight-vs-volume-speed

Not to mention, there is a 2X difference in weight across the USDA egg sizes. Even if you write your recipe based on using Medium eggs, but like many recipe writers never mention how big they are, since I buy Extra Large eggs I will be using an extra egg for every 4 eggs in your recipe, which can make a significant difference to some dishes.

Brian_Martin_197578

Whether or not you, or your lady friend, choose to remain members here is of no consequence to me. That's is entirely up to you. I cannot think of anything worthwhile that you have contributed to this community, so i could not care less if you choose to remain or leave.

fisher23

Ground beef at 118°F for five hours, that explains a lot.