Unit conversions & should we use country information?
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).
1 answer
I think that adding tags to indicate what measurements are used is a fine idea, however, we should refrain from adding too many tags and making it overcomplicated.
Drawing from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_weights_and_measures), it seems that there are predominantly three ways to measure ingredients: the metric way, the US way and the British way.
- The metric way mainly measures ingredients by weight and in metric units.
- The US way mainly measures ingredients by volume.
- The British way measures ingredients by volume and weight and in imperial units.
I would suggest that we add three tags for the time being: [metric-units], [us-units] and [uk-units]. This could go hand in hand with an article explaining key differences between these three systems, like that one system prefers to measure by using volumes and the other one by using weights.
As @Peter Taylor said, we should skip details where differences are very small to non-existent. For most recipes, it really doesn't matter if the added sugar or salt is 10 % more as the absolute value still is very low compared to other used ingredients. (Furthermore, it could get quite complicated to list differences for cups, teaspoons, tablespoons for various countries and / or regions.)
For complicated or precise recipes where it's mandatory to get the numbers right, ingredients should be measured in weight and not in volume.
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