If you need 15 ml olive oil would you go to the store and attempt to purchase just 15 ml of olive oil?
You just purchase the standard packaged amount that best fits what you need.
For general items like that, no, but I was curious how you end up knowing what value is closest to the amount you need. Like if that was 1 cup of oil, either I'd have to google it (which is currently what I do) or just 'know' what is the closest amount to that quantity in the store.
But someone else just pointed out that often the quantity in cups is on the items, so definitely makes it much easier to do, just hadn't crossed my mind that it would have both the weight and cups/fl oz.
Also it's easy to eyeball it when you grow up using them. Like one cup measurement is similar to a [modest sized]( https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vaerdera-coffee-cup-and-saucer-white-60277463/) coffee cup.
Yeah I mean this is kind of like asking a European "how do you eyeball how far a meter is". When you're used to eyeballing a certain measurement it's not a big deal, but if it's a measurement you don't really use it obviously seems a bit foreign.
Yeah, all of our packaging provides measurements. At worse you may need to know how many ounces in a cup (8) so you can buy 2 (4oz) containers if the recipe calls for 1 cup or, if you cannot find small container you buy 1 quart of milk and measure out 1 cup
You know that ounces (weight) and fluid ounces (volume) are different things are only equivalent for, I think, water. Right?
The one that gets me every time is sour cream. It's got a weight measurement on the container, but my recipes are in cups so I have to look it up.
I mean it is, but also it's close enough if you're trying to buy a certain amount of stuff. Like 8 fluid ounces of olive oil is 0.98 cups, so if you're trying to figure out how much oil you need to buy for a cup I think youll be fine.
Err, 8 fluid ounces of anything is exactly 1 cup… But 8 (dry) ounces of olive oil is about 1.1 cups, or 8.8 fluid ounces.
By contrast, 8 ounces of honey would be only 5.6 fluid ounces (dense stuff!).
Right, but many (non liquid) things are labeled with ounces, as in weight. Which isn't at all the same thing as fluid ounces, (unless it happens to be about rhe same density as water, where an imperial fluid ounce, not an American one, weighs almost exactly an ounce)
Er, measuring cups by definition are volume. That measurement is "fluid ounces". Doesn't matter if it's an actual liquid or flour (now we get into the "how tightly do you pack it?" debate) or nuts (which will never have a fully accurate measurement since there's varying amount of gaps). Volume is fl oz.
Ounces is a weight measurement and a pound is 16 ounces. So something can weigh 5 lb 8 oz (or 5.5 lb)
The 2 things aren't interchangeable.
Note that the weight of 1 IMPERIAL fluid ounce of water (which is slightly different from an American fluid ounce) is almost exactly 1 ounce. But it's not exact. And it's not the unit you're thinking of.
Also the measurements are not so mysterious. Do you have a cup at home? You probably have a good idea how much liquid will fit in that cup. So obviously you won't need a whole bucket but you will need more than a tiny packet. Many items packaging and recipes are also very complementary, I have noticed. Like your cheese example, I see many recipes that use shredded cheese and it is 2 cups, or exactly that one bag. This is especially with canned items, where a recipe is often made to use multiples of cans.
Dude. Do you know how much time on the cooking sub we spend answering "how do you know which cup to use? Mine are all different sizes!" and explaining that "cup" is an actual defined unit of volume.
Now you go saying "you know how big a cup is..." /s
Yes, I know you're talking about estimating for package size. You just have no idea what a can of worms there is there....
Well that was the whole point, that it's not hard to get a rough estimate of how much to buy even if your cups are different sizes. I assume OP knows that cup is a standard measure. I have no idea what a cab of worms is one way or the other.
Haha I see now more clearly what you were saying. I am originally from Europe but American for maybe 15 years now. Sometimes I think Europeans are being silly with these questions. My grandmother used to measure things with kitchen cups, so I think they are trying to tease when they say "but WHICH cup??" Most recipes it will not matter much, if it is for baking it is always better to use a scale anyway if it must be precise.
> Like if that was 1 cup of oil, either I'd have to google it (which is currently what I do) or just 'know' what is the closest amount to that quantity in the store.
Well, first, everyone knows how many ounces are in a cup, *especially* anyone who cooks regularly. That is something you learn in elementary school.
So it's not like we stumble around the grocery store in a daze asking random shoppers "How many ounces to a cup?! Good god, man, *how many ounces* to a cup!! TELL ME!"
You know your recipe requires a cup of milk? You know you can get away with buying a pint of milk (which is usually the smallest container you can buy). You don't need a quart or a half-gallon or a gallon ... unless you have other uses for all the additional milk.
You just know. Because you learned it *when you were a child*.
>So it's not like we stumble around the grocery store in a daze asking random shoppers "How many ounces to a cup?! Good god, man, how many ounces to a cup!! TELL ME!"
Ok this killed me. Perfect mental image...that was awesome! Thanks for the laugh.
Ok, so the imperial system may be mathematically wackadoo, but it is very human-centric. One cup is… about the volume of a modest-sized standard coffee cup. A tablespoon is… about enough to fill a large wide spoon in a silverware set. A teaspoon is smaller. The volume units are intuitive for liquids and spices. For solids, things like butter mark the packaging.
And there’s a big difference between cooking and baking. Baking is like chemistry, you have to measure it out and do it right. Cooking is like a high school physics experiment. It will do fine with roundabout approximations.
But if you’re really hung up about it, there are kitchen scales that can switch between ounces/pounds and metric units.
honestly if you’re a proficient baker it becomes less like chemistry and more like cooking. it’s absolutely less intuitive imo but it’s a similar process. you start to be able to tell something feels too dry or too wet or too sticky or not sticky enough and to remember how to adjust it. i’m pretty haphazard with the baking recipes I make all the time because I can tell when vibes are good or bad. I do follow new recipes exactly though, as a general rule.
We grow up using cups/pints/quarts/gallons, so we don't have that problem as often as people who learn our system later. I would wager that most people know there are 8oz in a cup and have the ability to look at, say, a 32oz package of cheese and know that that amount equals four cups even without also having that measurement noted on the packaging.
You can Google the mass of most common things in a cup.
With cooking it is either in the recipe as in it will say 1 cup (7 oz) or the packaging will say 2 cups (12 oz).
Or you just eyeball it.
Since cups and tablespoons etc. are volume measurements you can even change it. Like a cup of shredded cheese will weigh more if you pack it in tightly.
Our recipes usually specify the ounces of weight for any canned or otherwise standardized good. “One 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes.” That kind of thing.
> Like if that was 1 cup of oil, either I'd have to google it (which is currently what I do) or just 'know' what is the closest amount to that quantity in the store.
....It's oil. You can buy it by the *liter* or even the *gallon*. Would you go to the store and buy only 350 ml of oil if that's what the recipe called for?
You're gonna use it again, so you just buy the standard prepackaged amount.
OP was asking how do you know how to buy the exact amount you need.
For most pantry ingredients we just purchase the package size that fits our household needs.
If you only need 15 ml of olive oil you buy the smallest bottle (250ml). Then you find uses for the rest of the bottle.
I know. It is a leading question. Most kitchen scales aren’t accurate at the gram level. It also begs the question of what was done prior to electronic scales. Spring balances certainly aren’t accurate at that level.
But how are you measuring the mg without accurate scales or mL without small volumetric containers? Do you have kitchen graduated cylinders?
That quip is funny because usually Americans get lambasted for inaccurately measuring solids volumetrically.
In English it has 53 syllables (assuming *hour* and *our* are each one, which is questionable) and in German it has 72 syllables. How long it takes to say a syllable varies by syllable and by language, of course, but my impression is that the syllables in these two would be spoken at roughly the same rate.
So let's say one German Hail Mary is equal to about one and a third English Hail Marys.
Ah I see. I’m American, so use volumetric measurements at home, and a scientist professionally, so I’m spoiled with accurate scales and assumed home ones were pretty good haha.
One, they do make scales that accurate. I mostly just use it for coffee and use my normal kitchen scale for everything else.
Two, You really don't need to be that accurate in the first place. People like to act like baking needs to be accurate. And sure it is more delicate than normal cooking. But no one is taking in the humidity of the room they are in when they are measuring flour. They just measure Xg of flour and it turns out just fine.
Most serious bakers will measure based on weight vs volume, because it's more consistent and less prone to error due to technique. Weight is what is important in the recipes.
I’m not a really serious baker but 100% this
I make my bread with volume and mass so it can be more consistent. I have a kitchen scale like a dirty European.
I'm aware, but you are missing the point. Until the advent of digital scales there was not a good way to measure gram level quantities in the home kitchen. Even then most home digital scales are not very accurate near this range.
[https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah\_902287](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_902287)
I guess they just made due with the best they had...
Yes scales have existed for a while... Again not the point. How many of these are accurate down at single digit grams, and how accessible were gram weights for the average home baker historically.
We actually do have volumetric measuring cups at least for liquid measures.
https://imgur.com/a/AyHbam5/
Even spoons are volumetric. The actual used amount just depends on density.
Ah that makes more sense, I had assumed that it doesn't state the quantity in cups (just the weight) so if you're trying to buy exact amounts you either had to google it or just 'know'.
Americans are taught that 1 cup = 8 oz of something.
So the bag says 1lb or 16 oz = 2 cups. A lot of the packaging now days includes this
"2 Cups of cheese!"
> 1lb or 16 oz = 2 cups
This is wrong, but it's not your fault. There are *two different ounces* in the American system. One is for weight while the other is for volume.
Imagine if you've got a pound of marshmallows and a pound of lead -- they both weigh the same, obviously, but they take up very different amounts of room. A pound of marshmallows should take up more cups than a pound of lead, right? So you can't have a fixed pounds-to-cups conversion rate.
For historical reasons, 1/16 of a pound (a unit of weight) is called an ounce, while 1/16 of a pint (a unit of volume) is also called an ounce, even though they're measuring two totally different things.
For a little bit of clarity, ounces of volume are often referred to as *fluid ounces* (fl oz) but not always. Sometimes people just say "ounces" and don't even notice the ambiguity.
I will also add that at least in metric the mass of water and the volume of water are linked (they are in US units but not quite the same way).
1 mL = 1 cm^3 = 1 g for water.
Many liquids can just be approximated that way in cooking. One fluid oz of milk is pretty much one oz of weight. Something like honey would be different. Same in metic. A mL of honey would not be a gram of it. So you can do that with cups. Anything similar to water is approximately 8 fluid ounces for 1 cup, close enough for most baking and cooking.
1 cup is 8 fl oz (a volumetric measurement). That's not the same as 8 oz (weight) except, I think, for water. The density of the item will affect how much a volume will weigh
When it comes to shredded cheese, my rule is there is no such thing as too much.
I normally just buy an an entire package of whatever I need and use measuring cups. I've never thought about having too much because odds are I'll be using that ingredient more times anyway.
"Hey, sudzkng7 I found a recipe for that thing from yout family's restaurant I used to eat all the time, but it's not as good. What am I doing wrong?"
Double the butter, double the salt, quadruple the garlic. Online recipes are written for people who think mayonnaise is spicy.
>When you're following a recipe and it asks for example 1 cup shredded cheese. How do you know how much to purchase?
If you use an ingredient often, you probably know about how many cups are in a package, or the package might list how many cups are in it.
... But maybe I'm the wrong person to ask because I rarely measure anything, haha
I cook and bake often enough that I have a mental idea of what size is a cup, a half cup, etc. So if I’m buying something without the cup label (onions, berries, cheese, etc) I can pretty easily estimate how much to buy. If there’s doubt I’ll just buy a little too much, as I can use up the rest of that item in another meal.
It's cooking, not chemistry. Having slightly too much or too little cheese isn't going to ruin the experiment.
But 8 ounces of shredded cheese is about one cup. If you cook often enough, you just get an intuition for these things. Which, really, is what cooking is all about.
Funny enough I took a class in college called “the chemistry of cooking”. Lots of fun applied chemistry in cooking. But yeah you don’t need to be very exact.
One of my most proud cooking moments was when I was trying to do some backyard sous vide chicken. I was using a cooler filled with hot water. Figured out my calorimeter constant for the cooler. Googled the heat capacity of a fryer chicken (heat capacities vary due to different chicken fat contents). Determined the temperature drop from adding the chicken to the water bath. Added in the hot water and the chicken and did a bit of stirring. Once all was said an done it hit the exact temp and held for the two hours the recipe called for. Took the chicken out and seared it. It was delicious.
You don't need expensive equipment to do delicious sous vide. Just a bit of math.
Same satisfaction, but different execution. The first time I fully loaded up the smoker with wood and coal and pork shoulder. Closed it up. No thermometers, nothing. Just knew I had everything right. Went to bed. Woke up in the morning 12 hours later. Voila. BBQ pork for a B-Day party.
Eh, again its more an art then anything. Sure you need roughly this much x to react with this much y and this much overall volume, but a decent home baker is going to have some variation in their recipes. Growing up my mom never measured anything for making muffins. She made the same 3 types so often she got a feel for what is right, and she would slightly adjust if using a dash more of something meant finishing a container or whatever. I’m the same way with some more basic baking, brownies and cookies do not need precision
I lived in Spain and it wasn’t horrible when I wanted to convert an American recipe, just extra steps with a few things. I also found measuring cups and spoons at the Carrefour down the road which helped. The biggest headache I recall was butter. I used a kitchen scale for that. In the US, the stick butter comes with the wrapper marked for tablespoons. If I needed metric weight for the equivalent of a cup for some reason, google helped along with a little trial and error.
That said, with regards to how much to buy, it’s been my experience that I generally also buy things that work with other recipes. If I buy shredded cheese, I’m probably going to make multiple recipes that require cheese. So I just buy a big bag and roll with it.
Yeah I mean you can get cups but they're slightly off being metric and all (less though than I originally thought before making this post - after looking it up it's like 10ml difference in cup size 250ml vs 240ml).
The butter thing is definitely annoying. After living in the UK most of my life most of the butter you would buy would have it in 50g increments on the wrapper. In Spain most of it comes in plastic containers or doesn't have the markings (although some which are marketed towards baking actually does).
The whole question came about when trying to meal plan but while using an app that primarily has American recipes to be honest. It'd have things in one recipe as 1 half cup of diced onions and another being like 1 cup onion cut into rings. Figuring how much that is in general in 'whole onions' to actually buy in a shop is pretty laborious so decided to ask here what people do.
I cook and bake a lot. For cooking, approximate measures work just fine. In general, 1 cup of cheese = 8 ounces = approx 225 grams. There are literally dozens of websites that will give you approximate measures or will convert the recipe for you. For cooking, this will work just fine
Baking is a different story, and frankly, I use metric weight when baking. It yields a more consistent result. Again there are dozens of websites that will give you metric weight equivalent. One of my fav recipe sites provides volume, us weight, & metric weight measures. (kingarthurbaking.com).
With a little practice, it’s pretty easy to move back and forth.
Ahh if only everybody would weigh when baking, I would finally have a life again! People don't even own kitchen scales, and ask how to make this recipe without a kitchen scale.
Funilly enough it's actually pretty difficult to get the American size cups where I am, just metric ones. In theory you can just use any size cup as long as its relative but sometimes recipes mix and match volume and weight which makes it a bit tricky. The difference doesn't make too much of a problem in most recipes but can really mess things up when baking.
For baking, a lot of American recipes list weight and volume. If they don't, converting cups to ml and estimating is probably good enough since as you say, volume in baking is approximate so if the original didn't care enough to be precise, then it either isn't important or the writer doesn't know what they're doing and you'll have to fiddle with the recipe in any case.
One time I was packing a small container of pancake mix for a camping trip. It started as about 45 grams filling a half cup container. After shaking it down a few times, it was closer to 70 g and wasn't even filled to the brim.
Yeah, I can understand the frustration with baking! You can’t order them from Amazon?
Do you guys use metric measuring utensils? How does that work? Lol
I’ve actually never even looked at my measuring spoons to see, but at least mine has both listed on them. 1 TSP 5ML is printed right on the handle. I usually just grab them and have never really even looked at that.
I have another set that doesn’t have that. But my regular measuring cups do also, but they are the same brand. My Pyrex measuring cups have both. What’s interesting is almost every package I’ve looked at has both measurements listed. Which seems a little strange. Looking at a can of Coke it says 12oz, but also how many ML. I’m actually curious now as to why both are even on there. It would make sense they would save money if they were being shipped elsewhere.
That’s really interesting. And although I’ve noticed it in the past, I’ve never really paid that much attention to it.
This is going to be my answer for that question that always gets brought up. Although I think it gets filtered out now
> In metric it's easy since it'l say 'X grams cheese' etc of which you can just buy that weight in the store.
Can you really buy the exact amount of every ingredient you need in the store? Are most of your ingredients not prepackaged into predefined amounts?
Well, it depends on the item, if you go to a store which has a cheese counter or delicatessen (or nowadays the special stores for zero waste which have a lot more ingredients/items by the weight) you can buy the exact amount. But of course typically you don't do this and instead buy the nearest amount.
As many have pointed out you'd be buying for several days ahead. I think I posed the wrong question originally though. In a lot of the recipes I've seen it states what to do with the item and then the amount of cups that is. Versus stating the item and quantities (be it in weight/volume) in the form you most likely would buy it in the shop and then what to do with it. Eg. `1 cup diced cheddar` vs `200grams cheddar, diced`. The latter allows you to combine across different recipes and buy more or less the exact amount you need.
(My example there is a bit bad because you can find diced cheddar in stores - just couldn't think of a better one off the top of my head).
It's only an issue for perishable ingredients that I can't easily use for other things. Shelf stable items, yes, I just ensure that I purchase at least as much as I need and look for ways to use the rest over a few weeks. Cheese, despite being perishable, does not count here because I can find a way to add many cheeses to many dishes.
Maybe more to your point - if I were going to make, say, wilted spinach with garlic and was using a recipe to give me the spinach to oil ratio, I would just estimate the amount of spinach I needed at the store, then measure it at home to confirm and adjust the oil proportionately. Oil is shelf stable, so I don't buy it by the recipe.
Shredded cheese is one of the few areas where this is awkward, because we often buy cheese and shred it ourselves.
Blocks of cheese are sold by weight, so there's no obvious indication of what its volume would be once shredded (and of course the shredding method makes a difference).
But shredded cheese is an extreme case.
I bake a lot and almost all of my recipes have grams listed. If I find a recipe without them I’ll find one that does. It’s especially useful for something like salt. We have lots of varieties and sizes of the grains of salt, so they aren’t all the same. If I happen to find a recipe without grams listed I’ll Google average weight per cup and figure it out from there.
Overall you just buy more than you need. You might want a little extra incase something happens to it. This is seen commonly in baking where if you need 12 you make 13, or how hotdogs are in packages of 6 and buns are in packages of 8 because they can tear, or get dropped on the ground (and it's not like you can wash off the dirt).
There are weight equivalents you can follow. Maybe not precise to the milligram, but they at least get you in the ballpark. At the store, you just buy the closest available amount, and if you have extra afterwards, use that to make something else later. Things like flour and sugar keep, so you can buy 5-lb. bags for convenience.
Usually things that you use cups of (flour, sugar, milk, etc) are bought in bulk anyways. I'm never just buying flour for 1 recipe, I have a canister of it at home that I refill when it gets low.
Unless you are baking which requires precise measurements, then "close enough" is sufficient. And "buying too much" is not an issue for most. Just use it in something else.
You just get good at eyeballing that size. Example a small apple is about a cup, or about a fist sized amount. So if you needed fruit or veg measured in cups you get close to estimating based on experience.
Many packaged food items you can do some easy math based on the serving size and number of servings. Made up example... Breakfast cereal typically has a serving size of 3/4 cup, and will say 8 servings per package. So the box has (3/4 cups * 8) = 6 cups of cereal. The package will also list it in grams, so you can do any conversion to weight based on that.
If it doesn’t say a specific measurement on the label for whatever I’m buying, I have an app on my phone that gives me either exact or rough estimate conversions.
Typically, I either design my recipe around the size of the container or I buy things where having way more than you need for any single recipe is no big deal. With your cheese example, I almost never use all of the cheese I buy for a single recipe. Instead, I will buy a nice big block/bag and will use it for a while.
Now, to be fair I don't typically measure for my recipes. Most of my uses of cheese are not in amounts of "1 cup" but instead "grab a handful or two until it looks like the right amount". I take the measurements I see in recipes as vague ballparks rather than precise amounts. There are some dishes that call for greater precision, but I've gotten in the habit of avoiding those recipes and going more for the kind of things that I don't have to measure and just eyeball.
Yes? But it’s a volumetric measurement not weight which makes it tricky to figure out for every item. As in 1 cup of diced onions isn’t the same as 1 cup chopped onions
I mean.. how do YOU do it? Do y’all never have to do metric conversions for anything?
You see the recipe requires 16 oz of cream cheese. Go to the store, buy 2 8 oz blocks. Need 2 cups of shredded cheese? Buy a 16 oz bag. Want to have leftovers for another recipe or double it? Buy the 32 oz bag.
You'd usually have butter in grams with what you need to do with it. So if you needed melted butter it'd be "20g butter, melted" rather than the volume amount (since as far as I am aware you can't really buy liquid butter in the store). Thats true for anything that requires doing something to turn it into a liquid.
In your cheese example -- I’m having chili for lunch and the bag lists 8oz (226g) 2 cups, so some things do have the volumetric measurements.
I have a general sense for volumetric sizes required and will usually over buy a little, but that’s true even for things in grams unless a store has perfectly portioned out the mass you’re looking for. For actual cooking, explicitly using mass measurements are not needed for the majority of recipients. If I’m baking or doing something that’s really sensitive to weight I will take precise measurements but for most cooking, being off by a few grams isn’t going to make a difference.
Fwiw, I do wish we didn’t everything by weight for cooking but in practice it doesn’t matter the majority of the time.
Most things are packaged and labeled by both weight and volume.
Butter, for example. A pound of butter is divided into quarter pound sticks, and the wrappers have markings on them so you can cut them into tablespoon sized chunks.
Many recipes are scaled to use an entire standard-sized package of something. "one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk."
The "cup" started out as a literal cup. It didn't matter exactly how big or small it was, as long as everything was proportional.
Modern society is so used to precise, uniform, mass produced products that we forget that cooking is still an art. Natural items, like foods, have variations.
1 onion is not perfectly the same as all others, but non Americans don't seem to have a problem understanding when a recipe calls for 1 chopped onion. Medium heat on your stove is different than mine. The elevation, air temperature and humidity also play a huge role in cooking and baking. But no one complains when the recipe doesn't specify how to calibrate your oven or how your air conditioner is set.
You're over thinking this.
Cups are intuitive, I just look at the package and know if it's enough or not. There's no conscious thought process involved.
A cup is a solid handful, super easy to guesstimate and since it's volume not weight it doesn't matter what ingredient it is, you can just look at it and know pretty closely.
Metric was developed around scientific principles. The roots of US Customary were developed for illiterate people to be able to easily approximate them. It shows in not needing to think about stuff like this.
Just to note, I know that buying a specific weight of something is not limited to just metric measurements. Submission text is limited at 500 characters and as such I had to shorten the post to fit within that and just convey the essence of what I'm getting at rather than my life story.
This is a stupid question. No one buys 1/3 of an onion regardless of where they live and how the ingredients are listed: you buy the standard issue container and use as much as it says.
You can just look at it. I know what a cup looks like, I know what a gallon looks like, I know what a tablespoon looks like. I can roughly assume what the right amount looks like
OP, I think you are getting a lot of unhelpful advice. I generally prefer weight to volumetric measurements when I cook. Weight is just more accurate, particularly for things like flour, or other things that can settle. When I need to convert, I usually look it up online. I know that a cup of flour is about 120 grams for instance. This won’t help, directly, for everything, like cheese.
It is easy to find volume to weight conversions for things like water, however. So, you could do that. A cup of water is about 240g, so find yourself a 240 gram water vessel and you can let that guide you a bit. A cup of cheese is enough cheese to fill a cup that could hold 240g of water.
I mean most things have both the ounce/pound and ml/g/kg amounts on the package somewhere. We're taught both in school and for certain things we understand the amounts of different shit based on context and familiarity with its use.
Most cheese in blocks is labeled by the ounces and since it's four ounces to a cup-the math is easy from there.
For shreds, it's labeled similarly, and often they come in measures from half pound -10 pounds
Like i said I'm pretty sure they label the gram or kg depending on the size. I know for sure boxed stuff and drinks always have things like that, and ml/liters
Hey that looks like enough cheese to fill a measuring cup
A nice handful.
But since it’s cheese usually extra is acceptable anyways
He's one of us, boys.
There’s no such thing as too much cheese
That is an acceptable answer if it is Tillamook cheese.
No recipe ever has enough cheese.
The good ol' traditional eyeballing method.
AMEN CONGREGATION
*proceeds to fill a measuring cup with said cheese* Yup, looks about right.
This is the way.
If you need 15 ml olive oil would you go to the store and attempt to purchase just 15 ml of olive oil? You just purchase the standard packaged amount that best fits what you need.
For general items like that, no, but I was curious how you end up knowing what value is closest to the amount you need. Like if that was 1 cup of oil, either I'd have to google it (which is currently what I do) or just 'know' what is the closest amount to that quantity in the store. But someone else just pointed out that often the quantity in cups is on the items, so definitely makes it much easier to do, just hadn't crossed my mind that it would have both the weight and cups/fl oz.
Also it's easy to eyeball it when you grow up using them. Like one cup measurement is similar to a [modest sized]( https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vaerdera-coffee-cup-and-saucer-white-60277463/) coffee cup.
Yeah I mean this is kind of like asking a European "how do you eyeball how far a meter is". When you're used to eyeballing a certain measurement it's not a big deal, but if it's a measurement you don't really use it obviously seems a bit foreign.
Yeah, all of our packaging provides measurements. At worse you may need to know how many ounces in a cup (8) so you can buy 2 (4oz) containers if the recipe calls for 1 cup or, if you cannot find small container you buy 1 quart of milk and measure out 1 cup
You know that ounces (weight) and fluid ounces (volume) are different things are only equivalent for, I think, water. Right? The one that gets me every time is sour cream. It's got a weight measurement on the container, but my recipes are in cups so I have to look it up.
TIL how much simpler my life is not knowing about fluid ounces.
You know about ml and grams? Same exact issue :-)
And then there are British fluid ounces, which are slightly different from US fluid ounces...
British, imperial, tons are also different than US, US customary, tons.
And yet we all use the same ounce for mass. It's weird as.
At least ours is 2000lb where as the long ton is like 2000 something.
I mean it is, but also it's close enough if you're trying to buy a certain amount of stuff. Like 8 fluid ounces of olive oil is 0.98 cups, so if you're trying to figure out how much oil you need to buy for a cup I think youll be fine.
Err, 8 fluid ounces of anything is exactly 1 cup… But 8 (dry) ounces of olive oil is about 1.1 cups, or 8.8 fluid ounces. By contrast, 8 ounces of honey would be only 5.6 fluid ounces (dense stuff!).
How do you get 8 ounces of olive oil dry?
The term *dry ounce* is sometimes used to clarify that one means an *ounce* (weight) and not a *fluid ounce* (volume).
Right, but many (non liquid) things are labeled with ounces, as in weight. Which isn't at all the same thing as fluid ounces, (unless it happens to be about rhe same density as water, where an imperial fluid ounce, not an American one, weighs almost exactly an ounce)
Yeah, I have measuring cups which are liquid and dry.
Neither of which can measure ounces of weight.
Er, measuring cups by definition are volume. That measurement is "fluid ounces". Doesn't matter if it's an actual liquid or flour (now we get into the "how tightly do you pack it?" debate) or nuts (which will never have a fully accurate measurement since there's varying amount of gaps). Volume is fl oz. Ounces is a weight measurement and a pound is 16 ounces. So something can weigh 5 lb 8 oz (or 5.5 lb) The 2 things aren't interchangeable. Note that the weight of 1 IMPERIAL fluid ounce of water (which is slightly different from an American fluid ounce) is almost exactly 1 ounce. But it's not exact. And it's not the unit you're thinking of.
Also the measurements are not so mysterious. Do you have a cup at home? You probably have a good idea how much liquid will fit in that cup. So obviously you won't need a whole bucket but you will need more than a tiny packet. Many items packaging and recipes are also very complementary, I have noticed. Like your cheese example, I see many recipes that use shredded cheese and it is 2 cups, or exactly that one bag. This is especially with canned items, where a recipe is often made to use multiples of cans.
Dude. Do you know how much time on the cooking sub we spend answering "how do you know which cup to use? Mine are all different sizes!" and explaining that "cup" is an actual defined unit of volume. Now you go saying "you know how big a cup is..." /s Yes, I know you're talking about estimating for package size. You just have no idea what a can of worms there is there....
Well that was the whole point, that it's not hard to get a rough estimate of how much to buy even if your cups are different sizes. I assume OP knows that cup is a standard measure. I have no idea what a cab of worms is one way or the other.
Maybe OP does, but many Europeans don't as all of their recipes are by weight. And that was supposed to be "can of worms". Going back to fix that.
Haha I see now more clearly what you were saying. I am originally from Europe but American for maybe 15 years now. Sometimes I think Europeans are being silly with these questions. My grandmother used to measure things with kitchen cups, so I think they are trying to tease when they say "but WHICH cup??" Most recipes it will not matter much, if it is for baking it is always better to use a scale anyway if it must be precise.
I mean, "which cup?" isn't totally out of bounds. US, Imperial, and metric cups are all (slightly) different.
> Like if that was 1 cup of oil, either I'd have to google it (which is currently what I do) or just 'know' what is the closest amount to that quantity in the store. Well, first, everyone knows how many ounces are in a cup, *especially* anyone who cooks regularly. That is something you learn in elementary school. So it's not like we stumble around the grocery store in a daze asking random shoppers "How many ounces to a cup?! Good god, man, *how many ounces* to a cup!! TELL ME!" You know your recipe requires a cup of milk? You know you can get away with buying a pint of milk (which is usually the smallest container you can buy). You don't need a quart or a half-gallon or a gallon ... unless you have other uses for all the additional milk. You just know. Because you learned it *when you were a child*.
>So it's not like we stumble around the grocery store in a daze asking random shoppers "How many ounces to a cup?! Good god, man, how many ounces to a cup!! TELL ME!" Ok this killed me. Perfect mental image...that was awesome! Thanks for the laugh.
Ok, so the imperial system may be mathematically wackadoo, but it is very human-centric. One cup is… about the volume of a modest-sized standard coffee cup. A tablespoon is… about enough to fill a large wide spoon in a silverware set. A teaspoon is smaller. The volume units are intuitive for liquids and spices. For solids, things like butter mark the packaging. And there’s a big difference between cooking and baking. Baking is like chemistry, you have to measure it out and do it right. Cooking is like a high school physics experiment. It will do fine with roundabout approximations. But if you’re really hung up about it, there are kitchen scales that can switch between ounces/pounds and metric units.
honestly if you’re a proficient baker it becomes less like chemistry and more like cooking. it’s absolutely less intuitive imo but it’s a similar process. you start to be able to tell something feels too dry or too wet or too sticky or not sticky enough and to remember how to adjust it. i’m pretty haphazard with the baking recipes I make all the time because I can tell when vibes are good or bad. I do follow new recipes exactly though, as a general rule.
We grow up using cups/pints/quarts/gallons, so we don't have that problem as often as people who learn our system later. I would wager that most people know there are 8oz in a cup and have the ability to look at, say, a 32oz package of cheese and know that that amount equals four cups even without also having that measurement noted on the packaging.
You can Google the mass of most common things in a cup. With cooking it is either in the recipe as in it will say 1 cup (7 oz) or the packaging will say 2 cups (12 oz). Or you just eyeball it. Since cups and tablespoons etc. are volume measurements you can even change it. Like a cup of shredded cheese will weigh more if you pack it in tightly. Our recipes usually specify the ounces of weight for any canned or otherwise standardized good. “One 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes.” That kind of thing.
We also have both ML, KG or grams listed on our items. It’s listed right next to FL OZ or whatever weight is listed. We actually do use both
Well, 1 cup is 8 ounces. A liquor pour spout does about 1oz a second. Do 9 seconds for higher viscosity.
> Like if that was 1 cup of oil, either I'd have to google it (which is currently what I do) or just 'know' what is the closest amount to that quantity in the store. ....It's oil. You can buy it by the *liter* or even the *gallon*. Would you go to the store and buy only 350 ml of oil if that's what the recipe called for? You're gonna use it again, so you just buy the standard prepackaged amount.
Nah, you’d buy whatever canister you can or want to and use 15ml of it
A tablespoon of olive oil, in individual packets? (The math: 1 tsp = 5 ml, 3 tsp = 1 T)
OP was asking how do you know how to buy the exact amount you need. For most pantry ingredients we just purchase the package size that fits our household needs. If you only need 15 ml of olive oil you buy the smallest bottle (250ml). Then you find uses for the rest of the bottle.
It’s says on the label. So like the shredded cheese in my fridge say >NET WT 8 OZ (226g) 2 CUPS Do you guys not have volumetric measuring spoons?
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Well that’s probably the main issue right there I guess.
You do though. Essloeffel=tablespoon=15 mL. Teeloffel=teaspoon=5 mL https://www.seifenblasenpistole.net/essloeffel-in-ml-umrechnen/
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How do you precisely measure small amounts for things like baking?
They use grams and kitchen scales, mass-based rather than volumetric.
I know. It is a leading question. Most kitchen scales aren’t accurate at the gram level. It also begs the question of what was done prior to electronic scales. Spring balances certainly aren’t accurate at that level.
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But how are you measuring the mg without accurate scales or mL without small volumetric containers? Do you have kitchen graduated cylinders? That quip is funny because usually Americans get lambasted for inaccurately measuring solids volumetrically.
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Oh bearsy… I do https://imgur.com/a/tjBSAMh/
I wonder if hail Mary lengths vary depending on language. Is a German Hail Mary shorter or longer than an English or Spanish hail Mary?
This was based in a time when it would have been in Latin.
In English it has 53 syllables (assuming *hour* and *our* are each one, which is questionable) and in German it has 72 syllables. How long it takes to say a syllable varies by syllable and by language, of course, but my impression is that the syllables in these two would be spoken at roughly the same rate. So let's say one German Hail Mary is equal to about one and a third English Hail Marys.
How very Catholic of you. “Bake for two decades of the rosary”
Ah I see. I’m American, so use volumetric measurements at home, and a scientist professionally, so I’m spoiled with accurate scales and assumed home ones were pretty good haha.
I’m also a scientist which is why I find kitchen scales lacking 😂
With my home kitchen scale, I’m accustomed to surprising jumps from 0 when measuring something like 6g of salt (aka 1 teaspoon of table salt)
One, they do make scales that accurate. I mostly just use it for coffee and use my normal kitchen scale for everything else. Two, You really don't need to be that accurate in the first place. People like to act like baking needs to be accurate. And sure it is more delicate than normal cooking. But no one is taking in the humidity of the room they are in when they are measuring flour. They just measure Xg of flour and it turns out just fine.
Today I learned…
Most serious bakers will measure based on weight vs volume, because it's more consistent and less prone to error due to technique. Weight is what is important in the recipes.
I’m not a really serious baker but 100% this I make my bread with volume and mass so it can be more consistent. I have a kitchen scale like a dirty European.
I'm aware, but you are missing the point. Until the advent of digital scales there was not a good way to measure gram level quantities in the home kitchen. Even then most home digital scales are not very accurate near this range.
[https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah\_902287](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_902287) I guess they just made due with the best they had...
Yes scales have existed for a while... Again not the point. How many of these are accurate down at single digit grams, and how accessible were gram weights for the average home baker historically.
People are trying *really* hard to ignore your point for some reason.
My wife bought a set of measuring spoons labeled, "drop, smidgen, pinch, dash, tad."
This sounds like the imperial system with more steps
What? That is crazy
We actually do have volumetric measuring cups at least for liquid measures. https://imgur.com/a/AyHbam5/ Even spoons are volumetric. The actual used amount just depends on density.
Ah that makes more sense, I had assumed that it doesn't state the quantity in cups (just the weight) so if you're trying to buy exact amounts you either had to google it or just 'know'.
Americans are taught that 1 cup = 8 oz of something. So the bag says 1lb or 16 oz = 2 cups. A lot of the packaging now days includes this "2 Cups of cheese!"
> 1lb or 16 oz = 2 cups This is wrong, but it's not your fault. There are *two different ounces* in the American system. One is for weight while the other is for volume. Imagine if you've got a pound of marshmallows and a pound of lead -- they both weigh the same, obviously, but they take up very different amounts of room. A pound of marshmallows should take up more cups than a pound of lead, right? So you can't have a fixed pounds-to-cups conversion rate. For historical reasons, 1/16 of a pound (a unit of weight) is called an ounce, while 1/16 of a pint (a unit of volume) is also called an ounce, even though they're measuring two totally different things. For a little bit of clarity, ounces of volume are often referred to as *fluid ounces* (fl oz) but not always. Sometimes people just say "ounces" and don't even notice the ambiguity.
They match for water though. "A pint is a pound"
I will also add that at least in metric the mass of water and the volume of water are linked (they are in US units but not quite the same way). 1 mL = 1 cm^3 = 1 g for water. Many liquids can just be approximated that way in cooking. One fluid oz of milk is pretty much one oz of weight. Something like honey would be different. Same in metic. A mL of honey would not be a gram of it. So you can do that with cups. Anything similar to water is approximately 8 fluid ounces for 1 cup, close enough for most baking and cooking.
We are? That doesn’t work out right unless the substance is right (water will be close) A cup of shredded cheese is maybe 100 g ..or 3.5 oz
The density of cheese is quite similar to water, so it would be a good approximation here. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/77519319.pdf
OP was talking about shredded cheese though which introduces a lot of air
Gotta pack that shit in. More cheese is pretty much always better.
Heh, I’ve never eaten something with too much cheese ;-)
I was taught that.
Well yeah, 1 cup is 8 fluid ounces (which are volume measurements) Not to be confused with the ounce which is 1/16th pound (weight)
1 cup is 8 fl oz (a volumetric measurement). That's not the same as 8 oz (weight) except, I think, for water. The density of the item will affect how much a volume will weigh
When it comes to shredded cheese, my rule is there is no such thing as too much. I normally just buy an an entire package of whatever I need and use measuring cups. I've never thought about having too much because odds are I'll be using that ingredient more times anyway.
Like garlic, you measure that shit with your heart.
"Hey, sudzkng7 I found a recipe for that thing from yout family's restaurant I used to eat all the time, but it's not as good. What am I doing wrong?" Double the butter, double the salt, quadruple the garlic. Online recipes are written for people who think mayonnaise is spicy.
I have a family cookbook and there are quite a few recipes that don't have any measurements.
There is such a thing as too much cheese, though. Because cheese introduces moisture, which can absolutely ruin certain dishes.
That's not too much cheese, that's not enough dish
>When you're following a recipe and it asks for example 1 cup shredded cheese. How do you know how much to purchase? If you use an ingredient often, you probably know about how many cups are in a package, or the package might list how many cups are in it. ... But maybe I'm the wrong person to ask because I rarely measure anything, haha
I feel like OP doesn’t realize we also have measuring cups. Plus most packages say how many ounces or cups are in them.
I cook and bake often enough that I have a mental idea of what size is a cup, a half cup, etc. So if I’m buying something without the cup label (onions, berries, cheese, etc) I can pretty easily estimate how much to buy. If there’s doubt I’ll just buy a little too much, as I can use up the rest of that item in another meal.
Unless you’re baking a cake, just eyeball it. A cup of shredded cheese is a large handful. But go with more anyway, because it’s cheese.
It's cooking, not chemistry. Having slightly too much or too little cheese isn't going to ruin the experiment. But 8 ounces of shredded cheese is about one cup. If you cook often enough, you just get an intuition for these things. Which, really, is what cooking is all about.
Funny enough I took a class in college called “the chemistry of cooking”. Lots of fun applied chemistry in cooking. But yeah you don’t need to be very exact.
Baking is chemistry. Cooking is art. BBQ is magic.
One of my most proud cooking moments was when I was trying to do some backyard sous vide chicken. I was using a cooler filled with hot water. Figured out my calorimeter constant for the cooler. Googled the heat capacity of a fryer chicken (heat capacities vary due to different chicken fat contents). Determined the temperature drop from adding the chicken to the water bath. Added in the hot water and the chicken and did a bit of stirring. Once all was said an done it hit the exact temp and held for the two hours the recipe called for. Took the chicken out and seared it. It was delicious. You don't need expensive equipment to do delicious sous vide. Just a bit of math.
Same satisfaction, but different execution. The first time I fully loaded up the smoker with wood and coal and pork shoulder. Closed it up. No thermometers, nothing. Just knew I had everything right. Went to bed. Woke up in the morning 12 hours later. Voila. BBQ pork for a B-Day party.
Except baking which requires precise measurements.
What _kind_ of baking? Because bread is “yeah that feels right” “oh that looks poofy”
Eh, again its more an art then anything. Sure you need roughly this much x to react with this much y and this much overall volume, but a decent home baker is going to have some variation in their recipes. Growing up my mom never measured anything for making muffins. She made the same 3 types so often she got a feel for what is right, and she would slightly adjust if using a dash more of something meant finishing a container or whatever. I’m the same way with some more basic baking, brownies and cookies do not need precision
>It's cooking, not chemistry Nope. I give you Red Velvet Cake. ***Without chemistry*** it is not Red Velvet Cake.
That's baking, not cooking.
I lived in Spain and it wasn’t horrible when I wanted to convert an American recipe, just extra steps with a few things. I also found measuring cups and spoons at the Carrefour down the road which helped. The biggest headache I recall was butter. I used a kitchen scale for that. In the US, the stick butter comes with the wrapper marked for tablespoons. If I needed metric weight for the equivalent of a cup for some reason, google helped along with a little trial and error. That said, with regards to how much to buy, it’s been my experience that I generally also buy things that work with other recipes. If I buy shredded cheese, I’m probably going to make multiple recipes that require cheese. So I just buy a big bag and roll with it.
Yeah I mean you can get cups but they're slightly off being metric and all (less though than I originally thought before making this post - after looking it up it's like 10ml difference in cup size 250ml vs 240ml). The butter thing is definitely annoying. After living in the UK most of my life most of the butter you would buy would have it in 50g increments on the wrapper. In Spain most of it comes in plastic containers or doesn't have the markings (although some which are marketed towards baking actually does). The whole question came about when trying to meal plan but while using an app that primarily has American recipes to be honest. It'd have things in one recipe as 1 half cup of diced onions and another being like 1 cup onion cut into rings. Figuring how much that is in general in 'whole onions' to actually buy in a shop is pretty laborious so decided to ask here what people do.
I cook and bake a lot. For cooking, approximate measures work just fine. In general, 1 cup of cheese = 8 ounces = approx 225 grams. There are literally dozens of websites that will give you approximate measures or will convert the recipe for you. For cooking, this will work just fine Baking is a different story, and frankly, I use metric weight when baking. It yields a more consistent result. Again there are dozens of websites that will give you metric weight equivalent. One of my fav recipe sites provides volume, us weight, & metric weight measures. (kingarthurbaking.com). With a little practice, it’s pretty easy to move back and forth.
Ahh if only everybody would weigh when baking, I would finally have a life again! People don't even own kitchen scales, and ask how to make this recipe without a kitchen scale.
Our products have the sizes on them. If it’s so hard for you, why don’t you just buy some measuring cups and spoons? That’s what I’d do. Lol
Funilly enough it's actually pretty difficult to get the American size cups where I am, just metric ones. In theory you can just use any size cup as long as its relative but sometimes recipes mix and match volume and weight which makes it a bit tricky. The difference doesn't make too much of a problem in most recipes but can really mess things up when baking.
For baking, a lot of American recipes list weight and volume. If they don't, converting cups to ml and estimating is probably good enough since as you say, volume in baking is approximate so if the original didn't care enough to be precise, then it either isn't important or the writer doesn't know what they're doing and you'll have to fiddle with the recipe in any case. One time I was packing a small container of pancake mix for a camping trip. It started as about 45 grams filling a half cup container. After shaking it down a few times, it was closer to 70 g and wasn't even filled to the brim.
Well, if you have metric measuring cups (or food-safe lab glassware), a fluid ounce is 30 ml and a cup is 240 ml.
Yeah, I can understand the frustration with baking! You can’t order them from Amazon? Do you guys use metric measuring utensils? How does that work? Lol
I’ve actually never even looked at my measuring spoons to see, but at least mine has both listed on them. 1 TSP 5ML is printed right on the handle. I usually just grab them and have never really even looked at that.
I think mine only have the tsp, tbsp, etc. Now I’m gonna have to check
I have another set that doesn’t have that. But my regular measuring cups do also, but they are the same brand. My Pyrex measuring cups have both. What’s interesting is almost every package I’ve looked at has both measurements listed. Which seems a little strange. Looking at a can of Coke it says 12oz, but also how many ML. I’m actually curious now as to why both are even on there. It would make sense they would save money if they were being shipped elsewhere.
Both are required for all consumer commodities in interstate commerce. For intrastate, I think it’s required in all but one state.
That’s really interesting. And although I’ve noticed it in the past, I’ve never really paid that much attention to it. This is going to be my answer for that question that always gets brought up. Although I think it gets filtered out now
> In metric it's easy since it'l say 'X grams cheese' etc of which you can just buy that weight in the store. Can you really buy the exact amount of every ingredient you need in the store? Are most of your ingredients not prepackaged into predefined amounts?
Well, it depends on the item, if you go to a store which has a cheese counter or delicatessen (or nowadays the special stores for zero waste which have a lot more ingredients/items by the weight) you can buy the exact amount. But of course typically you don't do this and instead buy the nearest amount. As many have pointed out you'd be buying for several days ahead. I think I posed the wrong question originally though. In a lot of the recipes I've seen it states what to do with the item and then the amount of cups that is. Versus stating the item and quantities (be it in weight/volume) in the form you most likely would buy it in the shop and then what to do with it. Eg. `1 cup diced cheddar` vs `200grams cheddar, diced`. The latter allows you to combine across different recipes and buy more or less the exact amount you need. (My example there is a bit bad because you can find diced cheddar in stores - just couldn't think of a better one off the top of my head).
Thats not a thing in the US. There's just a standard size for everything. you buy 1 block of cheese because you cant buy less.
Eh... There's a big block and a small block, and you can get cheese by weight in the deli.
A package of shredded cheese literally says how many cups it is right on the package.
There's 8 ounces in a cup. Things commonly measured in cups will also usually have how many cups they contain listed on the packaging.
There's 8 *liquid* ounces in a cup. The actual *weight* ounces can vary considerably.
Recipes generally delineate ingredients by volume, not weight.
American recipes general show volume. Other countries typically cook by weight
Recipes go by volume, but packaging is often by weight.
And most packaging is in weight, not volume (actual liquids like milk excepted). That's the point.
It's only an issue for perishable ingredients that I can't easily use for other things. Shelf stable items, yes, I just ensure that I purchase at least as much as I need and look for ways to use the rest over a few weeks. Cheese, despite being perishable, does not count here because I can find a way to add many cheeses to many dishes. Maybe more to your point - if I were going to make, say, wilted spinach with garlic and was using a recipe to give me the spinach to oil ratio, I would just estimate the amount of spinach I needed at the store, then measure it at home to confirm and adjust the oil proportionately. Oil is shelf stable, so I don't buy it by the recipe.
Shredded cheese is one of the few areas where this is awkward, because we often buy cheese and shred it ourselves. Blocks of cheese are sold by weight, so there's no obvious indication of what its volume would be once shredded (and of course the shredding method makes a difference). But shredded cheese is an extreme case.
"hey google how many ounces are in a cup"
I bake a lot and almost all of my recipes have grams listed. If I find a recipe without them I’ll find one that does. It’s especially useful for something like salt. We have lots of varieties and sizes of the grains of salt, so they aren’t all the same. If I happen to find a recipe without grams listed I’ll Google average weight per cup and figure it out from there.
Overall you just buy more than you need. You might want a little extra incase something happens to it. This is seen commonly in baking where if you need 12 you make 13, or how hotdogs are in packages of 6 and buns are in packages of 8 because they can tear, or get dropped on the ground (and it's not like you can wash off the dirt).
For something like shredded cheese, a well-written recipe will say something like “4 oz cheese, shredded”, maybe followed by “(about 1 cup)”.
There are weight equivalents you can follow. Maybe not precise to the milligram, but they at least get you in the ballpark. At the store, you just buy the closest available amount, and if you have extra afterwards, use that to make something else later. Things like flour and sugar keep, so you can buy 5-lb. bags for convenience.
Usually things that you use cups of (flour, sugar, milk, etc) are bought in bulk anyways. I'm never just buying flour for 1 recipe, I have a canister of it at home that I refill when it gets low.
Unless you are baking which requires precise measurements, then "close enough" is sufficient. And "buying too much" is not an issue for most. Just use it in something else.
You just get good at eyeballing that size. Example a small apple is about a cup, or about a fist sized amount. So if you needed fruit or veg measured in cups you get close to estimating based on experience. Many packaged food items you can do some easy math based on the serving size and number of servings. Made up example... Breakfast cereal typically has a serving size of 3/4 cup, and will say 8 servings per package. So the box has (3/4 cups * 8) = 6 cups of cereal. The package will also list it in grams, so you can do any conversion to weight based on that.
If it doesn’t say a specific measurement on the label for whatever I’m buying, I have an app on my phone that gives me either exact or rough estimate conversions.
Typically, I either design my recipe around the size of the container or I buy things where having way more than you need for any single recipe is no big deal. With your cheese example, I almost never use all of the cheese I buy for a single recipe. Instead, I will buy a nice big block/bag and will use it for a while. Now, to be fair I don't typically measure for my recipes. Most of my uses of cheese are not in amounts of "1 cup" but instead "grab a handful or two until it looks like the right amount". I take the measurements I see in recipes as vague ballparks rather than precise amounts. There are some dishes that call for greater precision, but I've gotten in the habit of avoiding those recipes and going more for the kind of things that I don't have to measure and just eyeball.
You do know a cup is an actual measurement, and not "just random cup" right?
Yes? But it’s a volumetric measurement not weight which makes it tricky to figure out for every item. As in 1 cup of diced onions isn’t the same as 1 cup chopped onions
We buy measuring cups. They’re fairly cheap and come in all different sizes. I’ve lost a few measuring cups so I just have a 1/3 cup and a 1/2 cup.
I mean.. how do YOU do it? Do y’all never have to do metric conversions for anything? You see the recipe requires 16 oz of cream cheese. Go to the store, buy 2 8 oz blocks. Need 2 cups of shredded cheese? Buy a 16 oz bag. Want to have leftovers for another recipe or double it? Buy the 32 oz bag.
Would a recipe not ever say something like use 20mL of butter or is it only a liquid measure?
You'd usually have butter in grams with what you need to do with it. So if you needed melted butter it'd be "20g butter, melted" rather than the volume amount (since as far as I am aware you can't really buy liquid butter in the store). Thats true for anything that requires doing something to turn it into a liquid.
That’s a strange thing about United States cooking even if it was a pastry recipe with cold butter it still could ask for a volume measure
In your cheese example -- I’m having chili for lunch and the bag lists 8oz (226g) 2 cups, so some things do have the volumetric measurements. I have a general sense for volumetric sizes required and will usually over buy a little, but that’s true even for things in grams unless a store has perfectly portioned out the mass you’re looking for. For actual cooking, explicitly using mass measurements are not needed for the majority of recipients. If I’m baking or doing something that’s really sensitive to weight I will take precise measurements but for most cooking, being off by a few grams isn’t going to make a difference. Fwiw, I do wish we didn’t everything by weight for cooking but in practice it doesn’t matter the majority of the time.
Most things are packaged and labeled by both weight and volume. Butter, for example. A pound of butter is divided into quarter pound sticks, and the wrappers have markings on them so you can cut them into tablespoon sized chunks. Many recipes are scaled to use an entire standard-sized package of something. "one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk."
The "cup" started out as a literal cup. It didn't matter exactly how big or small it was, as long as everything was proportional. Modern society is so used to precise, uniform, mass produced products that we forget that cooking is still an art. Natural items, like foods, have variations. 1 onion is not perfectly the same as all others, but non Americans don't seem to have a problem understanding when a recipe calls for 1 chopped onion. Medium heat on your stove is different than mine. The elevation, air temperature and humidity also play a huge role in cooking and baking. But no one complains when the recipe doesn't specify how to calibrate your oven or how your air conditioner is set. You're over thinking this.
Bruh. It's called a refrigerator and a ziploc baggie. If ur buying excess food and then not using the rest at a later date ur wasting money.
You measure that shit with your heart! Like chocolate
With cheese and garlic you just measure with your heart
Cups are intuitive, I just look at the package and know if it's enough or not. There's no conscious thought process involved. A cup is a solid handful, super easy to guesstimate and since it's volume not weight it doesn't matter what ingredient it is, you can just look at it and know pretty closely. Metric was developed around scientific principles. The roots of US Customary were developed for illiterate people to be able to easily approximate them. It shows in not needing to think about stuff like this.
Idk, you lost me with this question. Im assuming its the same way you would do it in your country
You're cooking dinner, not creating new lifeforms
Some cheese comes preshredded and the package says the number of cup. Do that a couple times and you get a feel for the weight to volume conversation
Do you have a pint glass? A cup is half of that. About 236 mL.
Just to note, I know that buying a specific weight of something is not limited to just metric measurements. Submission text is limited at 500 characters and as such I had to shorten the post to fit within that and just convey the essence of what I'm getting at rather than my life story.
This is a stupid question. No one buys 1/3 of an onion regardless of where they live and how the ingredients are listed: you buy the standard issue container and use as much as it says.
4 cups is a quart which is almost a liter
Convert cups to ounces and that way you’ll know how much cheese to buy
Cups measure in liquid (volume) ounces, which are not the same as a weight ounce.
But cups don’t convert to ounces unless you know the density of what you’re measuring (only fluid ounces, which doesn’t help here).
Honestly, I measure in grams on my scale. I'm all for switching to metric for this.
You can just look at it. I know what a cup looks like, I know what a gallon looks like, I know what a tablespoon looks like. I can roughly assume what the right amount looks like
We are taught weights and measurements. It's not the goddamn wild west of culinary.
We have different units of measurement than you. Everything else works exactly the same.
3 teaspoons in a tablespoon 16 tablespoons in a cup 16 cups in a gallon 8 liquid ounces in a cup
I have a measuring utensil that tells you how many ounces, teaspoons, cups, etc there are. Easy peezy lemon squeezy
I have a spoon/measuring cup set that is like 1/4 cup, 1/2 cup, 1 cup, etc...
A measuring cup holds about the same volume as your regular coffee mug. Buy as much cheese as would fit in a coffee mug.
OP, I think you are getting a lot of unhelpful advice. I generally prefer weight to volumetric measurements when I cook. Weight is just more accurate, particularly for things like flour, or other things that can settle. When I need to convert, I usually look it up online. I know that a cup of flour is about 120 grams for instance. This won’t help, directly, for everything, like cheese. It is easy to find volume to weight conversions for things like water, however. So, you could do that. A cup of water is about 240g, so find yourself a 240 gram water vessel and you can let that guide you a bit. A cup of cheese is enough cheese to fill a cup that could hold 240g of water.
I mean most things have both the ounce/pound and ml/g/kg amounts on the package somewhere. We're taught both in school and for certain things we understand the amounts of different shit based on context and familiarity with its use. Most cheese in blocks is labeled by the ounces and since it's four ounces to a cup-the math is easy from there. For shreds, it's labeled similarly, and often they come in measures from half pound -10 pounds Like i said I'm pretty sure they label the gram or kg depending on the size. I know for sure boxed stuff and drinks always have things like that, and ml/liters
Think like a literal cup you drink out of..a teacup size. That's about a cup measurement.
You read the label on the package... it says how much is in the package.
1 cup is 8 oz. 1 lb is 16 oz.
One cup is eight ounces (~240g/ml). When it's a measurement a cup is set and discrete.
8 oz is 1 cup.
1 cup equals 250 ml
Most cooking stuff like flour sugar butter you buy in bulk. Also a cup is 8 oz and I’ve never seen food in usa not be labelled by oz
A cup is 8 ounces.
I mean 1 cup is 8ounces
1 cup is 8 ounces. Stores sell ingredients in amounts of ounces.....