Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Meta

Unit conversions & should we use country information?

+5
−0

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).

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

General comments (4 comments)

1 answer

+4
−0

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.

History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

General comments (2 comments)

Sign up to answer this question »