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Comments on Unit conversions & should we use country information?

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Unit conversions & should we use country information?

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We all prefer different units; that's a fact of sharing cooking internationally. That's relatively easy to solve here - we can put up a unit-conversions post here on Meta as a resource for folks who want to convert to their own preferred units.

What's slightly more problematic are things like eggs. I discovered to my detriment a couple weeks ago that a US "large" egg is a fair bit smaller than a UK "large" egg, so where my recipe called for "6 large eggs", I should've used 4. We can add these to our conversion tables too, but some folks won't know there's a difference and will just use what the recipe says.

To that end... should we make sure that all posts in our Recipes category specify what units they're using? This could be as simple as saying "6 US large eggs", or we could create tags (along the lines of [us-units], [uk-units], [eu-units], etc).

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General comments (4 comments)
General comments
Monica Cellio‭ wrote over 4 years ago

Oh wow; I did not know that about eggs! And here I thought specifying egg size and not just count was sufficient!

Mithrandir24601‭ wrote over 4 years ago · edited over 4 years ago

How about one (big) post of all the differences, from the differences in a teaspoon, to the size of eggs, to weight conversions etc.? Perhaps under a 'cooking notes' category? Using tags to distinguish between the two because easier to read without every ingredient referring to US/UK sizes?

ArtOfCode‭ wrote over 4 years ago

That'd work for me, @Mithrandir24601

Peter Taylor‭ wrote over 4 years ago

@Mithrandir, the differences in a teaspoon are on the order of 1.5%, and so are negligible. If that precision matters, quantities should be expressed in milligrams. IMO it would be better to stick to non-negligible differences and avoid hiding the important ones in what could potentially be a sea of clutter.